CzechInvest’s Japan office has new director

25 Jul. 2006 | CzechInvest | Beginning this month, CzechInvest’s Japan office in Yokohama will be lead by Ondrej Votruba, whose predecessor, Jan Kubicek, is returning to Prague in order to head a group of projects focused on the Triangle industrial zone in Zatec.

Before being named as the director of the Japan office, Ondrej Votruba held the position of project manager at CzechInvest, where he began work in January of this year. He had previously worked for four years as the assistant to the CEO of JETRO Praha, a Japanese governmental organization focused on supporting Japanese investors in the Czech Republic and developing Japanese-Czech business relations. Votruba is a graduate of the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of Economics in Prague and speaks English, Japanese and German.

"The inflow of investment from Japan to the Czech Republic has been at a stable, high level for several years. Japan is second only to Germany in the amount of investments into production, research and development, and I would like to maintain this trend. At CzechInvest, I worked on the projects of IPS Alpha, which decided to invest in the Triangle strategic industrial zone in Zatec and also of Hitachi which confirmed its interest to invest there too,“ says Ondrej Votruba, the new director of CzechInvest’s office in Japan, adding: “My vision for the coming period is to use the extensive production base of Japanese firms in the Czech Republic to encourage some of these companies to also transfer sophisticated operations such as R&D, technology and design centres, etc. to the CR, which corresponds to the vision of the country’s future as a knowledge economy.“

The Yokohama office was opened in the autumn of 1997 as CzechInvest’s sixth foreign branch.Since then, the office has taken part in more than 70 projects of Japanese companies that have invested in the Czech Republic. The director of the foreign office is responsible for CzechInvest’s marketing activities with the aim of building the image of the Czech Republic, finding investors and supporting them when deciding to invest in the CR.

In addition to the Yokohama office, CzechInvest has eight other offices abroad – London, Brussels, Cologne, Paris, Munich, Hong Kong and two in the United States (Chicago, Silicon Valley).