THE international investment conference and the recent visit of senior US investors provided us with an invaluable showcase of the best of what Northern Ireland has to offer.
This region has vast untapped potential. We have a skilled workforce, a steady pipeline of talent from our higher and further education institutions, dual market access, and emerging clusters in new industries like tech, cyber security, and health and life sciences. But there is so much more we can achieve if we get the fundamental building blocks in place.
Retail NI, along with our Trade NI colleagues, launched a blueprint for economic growth and prosperity for Northern Ireland at the House of Commons and in Dublin. While the report looks back and recognises how far we have come over the past 25 years, our document, produced by BDO, is about a path to greater economic success over the next decade and beyond. We want Northern Ireland to be the very best place in the UK to locate, start and scale up a business.
The report examines how local industries, businesses, and high streets have been boosted by peace, prosperity, and greater stability. It identifies key strengths of the Northern Irish economy and how these can be leveraged to deliver greater economic growth and prosperity in future decades for local communities and businesses.
Restoring Stormont, fixing our planning system to facilitate speedier construction of major capital infrastructure projects, investing in our educational institutions to ensure our workforce of the future has the right skills and competencies, capitalising on our dual market access, and reforming our public sector to remove our dependence on it are all key priorities for us.
While we are rightly making a priority of attracting more FDI, we shouldn’t forget our local indigenous industries, particularly our world class agri-food sector.
Retail NI is now doing so much more to support many new and existing local agri-food sector companies with their route to market with our retail and wholesale members. We use our magazine as a marketplace to promote their products, send a fortnightly email to thousands of retailers promoting any new products, host an annual trade show to showcase them and a growing number of them have even made successful elevator pitches to our board.
Many of these are brand new businesses who don’t yet have the capacity to get on central billing of our wholesalers but are looking to get their produce in perhaps a dozen or so stores to get started and build up from there. Retail NI has helped hundreds of these companies with this process and want to go further still in helping them realise their full potential with the local market.
By welcoming these agri-food businesses into our membership, this has changed Retail NI into a supply chain organisation. We now have breweries, bakeries, dairies and many more local producers as active members of Retail NI, building productive relationships with our independent retailers and wholesalers.
February 27 next will see our Supplier Showcase event, which we hope it will be bigger and better than ever before. Watch this space.
:: Glyn Roberts is chief executive of Retail NI
