Aragon Exterior (AREX) is the government organisation that supports overseas companies wishing to establish and expand in Aragon. Based on an AREX initiative, Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC), conducted a benchmarking study to demonstrate the competitiveness of the region compared with other logistics hubs across Europe as an attractive location for international distribution activities.
There are many factors that may influence a company’s choice of location, not all of which are necessarily economic, or easily captured in a business case. These can range from large questions of International Relations, to ‘soft’ issues such as the attractiveness of an area to the families of senior staff who may be required to relocate (housing, schools, cuisine, even the weather).
Even strictly business issues can be hard to quantify – for example the ‘cluster’ effect, whereby established locations for an activity are likely to enjoy a higher availability of support services, from staff training to material handling equipment maintenance. For this study the focus was on five readily quantifiable and comparable sets of factors: infrastructure (land and buildings costs), workforce costs and availability, transport costs, global trading provisions, and taxes.Chosen locations for comparison included the Rotterdam area of The Netherlands, the Hauts-de-France region centred on Lille, the Emilia-Romagna in Italy (Bologna) and North-Rhine Westphalia in Germany with emphasis on the important inland port of Duisburg. Besides these well-established logistics ‘clusters’ the focus was also on the Czech Republic as a potentially significant new competitor. Numerous databases and sources from organisations were used for this analysis, including Eurostat, World Bank, national statistical databases, real estate companies, port authorities, transport operators and international consultancies, as well as personal meetings with experts in transport and logistics.
