Johnson Matthey, one of the largest producers of automotive catalysts, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Government of Macedonia. My team and I are extremely excited to finally see this project slowly come to fruition. We have been working with JM in relative secrecy over the past several months to ensure Macedonia met and exceeded all of JM’s requirements for a new site to produce catalysts. While this is not a final decision — JM’s Board has to ratify this in July 2007 — the MoU deepens our cooperation and formalizes Macedonia as a top choice for a new plant.
With Johnson Controls already building an electronics manufacturing and assembly plant, and JM a new tenant in the free economic zone near Skopje, we are picking up momentum as a destination for manufacturing. This is especially exciting considering that JM looked at over 10 countries and 100s of sites to settle on Macedonia. It’s a combination of extremely attractive fiscal policy (0% taxes for 10 years, very low lease rate), available, inexpensive and well-qualified labor force, logistics to Western Europe and other infrastructure factors.
Read some of the Macedonian press coverage here: