Rick Weddle: Welcome to “Site Selection Matters” where we take a close look at the art and science of site selection decision making. I’m your host Rick Weddle, president of the Site Selectors Guild. In each episode, we introduce you to leaders in the world of corporate site selection and economic development. We speak with members of the Site Selectors Guide, our economic development partners, and corporate decision-makers to provide you with deep insight into the best and next practices in our profession.

In this episode, we have as our guest, Andreas Dressler, managing director of Location Decisions, Berlin, Germany based location advisory firm that assists companies in the location analysis and site selection in Europe and around the world. Today, Andreas will talk with us about investment attraction strategies in the post-COVID-19 world in which we live today. Join me as we welcome Andreas Dressler to “Site Selection Matters”.

Andreas, we’re all working every day to try to figure out how to best manage in this new environment. What are you seeing really in Germany in terms of re-opening the economy?

Andreas Dressler: Well, I think the approach has been very different throughout all of Europe, so Germany specifically or Germany specifically. It’s starting to slowly re-open, so people are starting to go back to work, factories particularly in the automotive industry which has caused a lot of concern have re-opened in many cases.

So, things are returning to some semblance of normalcy. You have a similar development in other European countries. Some countries primarily the Nordic countries like Sweden have had a more relaxed attitude. Things there have been going on pretty much as normal.

Countries that have been more impacted like Spain and Italy are also slowly starting to re-open and have introduced re-opening plans that will see their economies not go back to full capacity but certainly see major industries get back online between now and the end of June.

Rick: Well, thank you, Andreas. That’s really interesting. I haven’t used the word normal in a sentence in the last few weeks without having the word new in front of it, so we’re all trying to figure out what will be the new normal as we go forward. Why don’t you take a minute if you don’t mind to help our audience understand what you see, as a corporate location advisor, in the corporate investment and global growth dynamics, the changes that are underway?

Andreas: The biggest question I think for everybody in this field, whether you’re a site selector or an economic developer, is what’s going to happen to investment, what’s happening with investment projects. And probably everybody has experienced the same thing. Projects are being put on hold or being canceled out, right? That’s happening for different reasons.

Now, certainly there are a lot of companies in industries that are being impacted very hard, and they’ve had to cancel their projects because their focus right now is really on survival. It’s on retaining cash. It’s on not laying off too many workers. And the last thing these companies are thinking of is expanding. So those projects are pretty much gone.

We also see a lot of companies, and this is probably the largest group based on my experience and some of the conversations I’ve been having that are simply putting projects on hold. In many cases, these are companies that want to invest, have fundamental reasons to be investing, but because of the uncertainty around everywhere in the world right now, they just can’t make those decisions. They’re waiting to see how thin