New investment is coming to the Marijampolė Free Economic Zone (FEZ): a factory will be built, producing high added-value nutritional proteins. The project should be announced soon, and the year-long construction is expected to start in spring 2023.
It is planned to build a factory with up to 100 employees, most of them highly qualified specialists.
“Bringing a new company to the Marijampolė FEZ requires a lot of preparatory work, many meetings, coordination, negotiations and trips to ministries in the capital. I am therefore delighted every time this kind of work bears fruit and another investor, selected in accordance with our strategy, creates new jobs in the FEZ.
The arrival of new companies is also beneficial to Marijampolė’s small business community, which can develop by providing services to larger, export-oriented businesses and thus increase the income earned by local residents.
The establishment of each newly-arrived high-tech company is an achievement for our city, because it proves that high value-added jobs can be created not just in the big cities. We will continue to work so that there would be more companies like these,” says the Mayor of Marijampolė, Povilas Isoda.
Already looking for employees
Kęstutis Lipnickas, head of UAB Divaks, established in the FEZ, says that the company operates in a new and rapidly developing niche of the food industry, and the project is funded by both foreign and Lithuanian investors.
“Until now, our attention has been focused on foreign partners: after successfully creating the pilot project, we met with potential investors, conferred with future buyers of our products, negotiated with equipment suppliers, performed testing, documented production, and now we are starting factory design and planning construction.
Although our investors and the future buyers of our products are concentrated abroad, we decided to build a factory in Lithuania because we want our work to bring its first benefits here. We chose Marijampolė FEZ for its convenient logistics, ready infrastructure and availability of the qualified specialists we need. In addition, we felt a lot of support from the team of Marijampolė city officials and the FEZ management company,” says Lipnickas.
The factory is expected to begin operating in mid-2024 and is expected to reach full capacity a couple of years later. However, the company’s representatives are already looking for future employees among university students studying food science, biotechnology and engineering.
Coordinating the volume of investment
“Marijampolė’s FEZ is accelerating. Our operational foundation consists of industrial production in segments that in Lithuanian sound like “the 3 M’s”: metalas (metal), mediena (wood) and maistas (food). It is the companies in these sectors that are most active in the Marijampolė region, and at the same time there is a growing number of specialists in these sectors, who make our city attractive to other companies in these industries,” says Simonas Petrulis, Director of the Marijampolė FEZ management company.
The factory will be allocated a plot of about 4 hectares in the Marijampolė FEZ. The total amount of the investment is still being finalised.