Panattoni Park Stribro has attracted another major investment: 200 new jobs and over 30 million euros
Panattoni Park Stribro, that has just recently been awarded the Industrial Zone of the Year 2013 in the Czech Republic, has attracted another major investment. On Tuesday 11 November, 2014 a groundbreaking ceremony took place to mark the beginning of the construction of a new plant of the KION Group, which plans to manufacture forklifts. The facility will comprise roughly 24,000 square meters and it will initially employ 200 workers. Production is due to start in the year 2016 and the plant will have the capacity to annually produce around 10,000 forklifts. The KION Group plans to invest around 12 million euros into machinery and equipment. It is the third major investment attracted to the Park in just a few months’ time. The enlargement of the zone is the outcome of the joint efforts of Panattoni Europe and the new Czech industrial group Accolade, which will also finance the construction of the new building and lease it to the KION Group afterwards.
“Panattoni Park Stribro ranks among our most successful industrial parks in the whole Central and Eastern Europe,” says Pavel Sovicka, Managing Director of Panattoni Europe Czech Republic. Peased with the good cooperation with the municipalities Sovička adds: "A few weeks ago a new roundabout replaced an already obsolete and not very safe traditional road crossing. We participated in its construction together with the Pilsen Regional Authority; I am quite sure that it helped traffic in Kostelec as well – the village where the Park lies.”
Milan Kratina, Chairman of the Board of the Accolade industrial group, explains that the construction of the new building for the KION Group alone will cost about 20 million euros. The Accolade Group itself will fund this amount, and then hand the building over to the KION Group under a long-term lease. “The total investment into the industrial park is thus worth around 30 million euros,” stresses Kratina, and continues: “The demand for new investments in the Czech Republic has been increasing in the last few months, which will have a positive effect on the whole Czech economy. The demand is there for industrial parks mainly along our borders with Germany. Talking about the parks we are preparing, the Pilsen Region is not the only region that attracts investors’ attention: we have also seen a high rise in demand for the As and Cheb regions.”
The KION Group plant is the third large investment project undertaken in the Panattoni Park Stribro in just a few months’ time. Not a long time ago, Ideal Automotive, the manufacturer of spare parts for automotive industry, signed the lease contract for the construction of a production hall comprising 16,000 square meters where it currently employs 400 workers; and the world’s largest office solutions manufacturer, Steelcase, invested 25 million euros and created more than 300 novel job opportunities in the zone. The construction of its 27.000 square meter industrial hall has been completed by Panattoni Europe in September this year.