Derby rubs shoulders with Europe’s best

Marketing Derby’s Annual Business Event provided an opportunity to highlight its achievements over the past year – the most recent being named as one of the best in Europe for attracting overseas investment.

Part of Marketing Derby’s Invest in Derby service involves attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) to the city.

And in the recently published Financial Times’ fDi European Cities and Regions of the Future 2023 rankings, Derby was placed fourth within the Top 10 Small European Cities for FDI Strategy category, which recognises the cities who have devised the strongest strategy for attracting investment.

Derby was ranked alongside other cities in countries across Europe, including Portugal, Ireland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

fDi Intelligence is a service from the Financial Times and is the largest Foreign Direct Investment centre of excellence globally.

The rankings are one of the industry’s most prominent benchmarks of FDI competitiveness, measuring economic, financial, and business strengths.

For this year’s rankings, fDi’s research team assessed data from 549 locations across Europe, made up of 370 cities, 141 regions and 38 LEPs.

At this year’s Annual Business Event, Marketing Derby’s investment team took to the stage to talk about their work in attracting inward investment to the city and county.

Among them was inward investment executive Christopher Tebbs, who explained the significance of Derby’s placing.

He told the ABE: “We were delighted to be placed within the top five. It’s a great award because investors do take note of it.

“It’s also great to be in there as it backs up what we say and our FDI strategy.

“We were placed fourth but watch out for next year because we’ll be coming for that top spot.”

In the same rankings, Derby and Derbyshire also enjoyed success in a category, which recognised the efforts of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs).

The D2N2 LEP (Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire) was ranked 10th in the Cost Effectiveness category.

Both awards will be presented at a ceremony to be held at MIPIM, the global property fair that is set to take place in Cannes, in the south of France, later this month.