Growing your business in Hauts-de-France: How NFI can help
Whether or not we were your first partner in Hauts-de-France, Nord France Invest is the right choice to help your business grow. Want more space? Ready to recruit new employees? Need to upgrade your production facilities? We’ve got solutions that will make the process faster—and easier.
Whether or not we were your first partner in Hauts-de-France, Nord France Invest is the right choice to help your business grow. Want more space? Ready to recruit new employees? Need to upgrade your production facilities? We’ve got solutions that will make the process faster—and easier.
Growing your business in Hauts-de-France: How NFI can help
We’ve helped many clients overcome these challenges:
- You need a new site.
- You’re competing with other parts of your group for investment resources, and you want to make the business case with your parent company.
- You need to take a fresh look at your finances
How we can help
- With our partners in the Invest in Hauts-de-France network, we work to find the right site for you, meeting your specifications for land, buildings and more.
- We show you how to tap into the financial resources available to businesses here—including subsidies, equity investments and repayable advances.
- We make administrative formalities faster and easier. Count on us to help with building permits, environmental approvals and more.
- We provide training support by connecting you with specialists in Hauts-de-France and nationwide.
- We help you make your case with your parent company, by providing official letters of support and meeting with your decision makers.
Do you want to acquire an existing business in Hauts-de-France?
Two studies in success
Booking.com doubles down in Tourcoing
Customer relations specialist Booking.com had been doing business in the Greater Lille area since 2010, with a workforce of 450 and an 1,800-sq m building in Tourcoing. By 2017 it needed to double in size, and began to consider other sites in Europe.
For months, Nord France Invest worked to make Hauts-de-France the company’s location of choice for the second time, acting as the interface between Booking.com and the entire community of regional partners, including the city of Tourcoing, the Hauts-de-France Region, the Lille metropolitan council, and Ville Renouvelée, a local urban developer.
The city issued a building permit for a new 8,000-sq m facility in record time. On October 4, 2019, Booking.com opened the largest customer service center in Europe, with a workforce of 800.
Häagen-Dazs: 25 years of growth and job creation
In 1992, US-based Häagen-Dazs began making its premium ice creams at a plant near Arras. In 2016, the General Mills brand was ready to expand its production capacity and introduce ice cream bars and other new products to the market—a delicious challenge! The plant positioned itself to win funding for new production lines, and regional players swung into action to support the effort.
NFI took a hands-on approach, working hand in hand with other partners to help the company negotiate the financial aid process—and a tightly knit team of institutional players helped sway the investor’s decision in favor of the Arras site.
The €16 million investment raised the plant’s profile within General Mills, enabling it to create 80 new jobs and introduce innovative new products. Its workforce now stands at 400, rising to 600 during peak production periods.
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