CONSUMER PRODUCTS

Leroy Merlin’s Polish plan

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French retailer Leroy Merlin plans to invest about $1.13bn in the next five years to almost double the number of stores in Poland and cash in on the construction boom. The company plans to have about 50 retail outlets by the end of 2012, and open four or five every year.

ENERGY

Siemens plant in Lisbon

Siemens has announced an investment of $919m in the construction of a gas-powered electrical plant in northern Lisbon, Portugal. The plant will be operational in 2011 and will have a capacity of 830MW.

ENGINES AND TURBINES

Toyota goes green in Wales

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Japan’s Toyota Motor Corporation is investing $181.71m in a UK manufacturing project to produce new small engines at its factory in north Wales. The plant will manufacture four-cylinder, 1300cc engines from late-2009. The move is part of Toyota Europe’s efforts to produce engines with low carbon dioxide emissions and superior fuel economy for Europe, to meet strict environmental regulations.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Citibank arm in Russia

US financial firm Citigroup has launched an operations centre in Russia to support its banking arm Citibank. The new division in Ryazan has a total area of 6100 square metres that will host fast-growing departments such as CitiPhone, credit operations and account fulfillment operations. The company has more than 100 employees working in Ryazan and plans to increase that to 400 by the end of 2008. It is expected the facility will host more than 1000 employees by 2010. It will be the main Citibank operations centre in Russia.

PAPER AND PACKAGING

Murdoch plant breaks record

Rupert Murdoch’s News International has opened what is being billed as the world’s largest printing plant in Broxbourne, 32 kilometres north of London. The plant will print the company’s four British papers, The Sun, The News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times. The new plant houses 12 presses capable of producing more than one million full-colour newspapers an hour, on a site big enough to house 23 football fields.

REAL ESTATE

Spain’s Trafford Centre

UK developer Peel Holdings is working on a mixed-use project in the city of Torremolinos in Spain called the Trafford Centre España. Construction on the 324,000-square-metre facility will begin in 2009 and is scheduled for completion in 2011. The Trafford Centre will have 93,000 square metres of retail space, a cinema, hotels and residential elements.

This investment news and data has been generated by fDi Markets, a crossborder investment tracking service that is part of Financial Times Ltd's fDi Intelligence division www.fdiintelligence.com

EUROPE FDI, 2007 (NUMBER OF PROJECTS):

Source: fDi Intelligence

 

EUROPE FDI, 2007 (NUMBER OF JOBS):

Source: fDi Intelligence

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