In a delegation led by Bert Pauli (Vice Governor of Brabant) last month, BOM Foreign Investment colleagues Frits Hoeve and Edwin Zonder travelled to Japan accompanied by representatives of Holst Centre and High Tech Campus Eindhoven. The visit was focused on discussing the extensive high tech and research & development possibilities Brabant has to offer to the Japanese companies. The delegation participants visited almost twenty companies in four days, in the cities Osaka and Tokyo. These were companies that are already based in Brabant, such as Shimano, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Toyota Industries, Hitachi Construction Machinery, Mitsubishi Materials, Ricoh, Marubeni and Omron, but also companies that might be interested in setting up a subsidiary in this Dutch Province. Additionally Brabant networking events were organized at the residency of the Consul General in Osaka and the other at the Dutch Embassy in Tokyo, these were very well visited by in total more than 40 representatives of Japanese companies.

Next to the company visits, High Tech Campus Eindhoven signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. This MOU is meant to accelerate collaboration with global companies by setting up joint laboratories bilaterally on both campuses, to promote joint projects based on Japanese and European state of the art technologies, and to exchange information for managing open innovation hubs.

The visits were organized in close cooperation with the Netherlands Foreign Investments Agency in Japan. The province of Brabant is already home to more than 70 Japanese subsidiaries.

A small selection of photos of this visit can be found on our facebookpage.