Brnabic: Serbia ready for technologically advanced, capital-intensive investments

SEOUL - Serbian PM Ana Brnabic said on Friday in Seoul Serbia was ready to receive technologically advanced, capital-intensive investments.

Brnabic said this after the signing of a MoU with the South Korean conglomerate SK Group, noting that Serbia's chance lay in the fact the conglomerate had no biotech centres in Europe.

"Our intention now is to bring in technologically advanced capital-intensive investments," Brnabic said, adding that Serbia had very good references and was prepared for such investments.

She noted that companies such as NCR and Microsoft had come to Serbia in the past five or six years and that the country also had an R&D centre where talented and creative people were developing new products and technologies.

"The signing of a MoU with South Korea's second-largest conglomerate is very good news. The largest one is Samsung, and SK Group is the second-largest. It (the MoU) is about a possible investment by their biotech arm in Serbia," Brnabic explained.

Noting that she did not want to raise expectations too high, Brnabic said she hoped "we will reach a final agreement by the end of this year."

"We will have the first huge capital-intensive investment in Serbia. In the second half of September, the company's representatives will send a delegation to Serbia for further talks," Brnabic said, expressing the hope the investment would be followed by more such investments in the future.

She said trade cooperation with South Korea had grown significantly since the opening of a Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency office in Belgrade in 2015.

"Our volume of goods trade has risen by almost 50 times in ten years. Exports to Korea rose by over 100 times. Exports rose from 2.1 mln to 214 mln dollars and goods trade amounted to 585 mln in 2022. If we look at the potential, that is still extremely low. Our ambition is to aim for 1 bln in the next two to three years and for much more after that," Brnabic noted.