Insider Media Limited

Marketing Birmingham chief executive Neil Rami says its Business Birmingham programme has been launched because the city has punched below its weight in inward investment terms. Rami spoke to Insider following a briefing to the property sector about the city’s plans for next year’s MIPIM property development and inward investment conference in France.

He said: “It’s about market share. In the last five years we have had 5 per cent of UK FDI {foreign direct investment}. That’s about mid-table.”

Business Birmingham was launched last week and effectively replaces Locate in Birmingham. The new strategy is intended to create 6,700 new jobs by 2015. Gary Taylor, deputy chairman of Marketing Birmingham and executive director of Brindleyplace developer Argent, said the business community has been clamouring for the organisation to be given the inward investment brief for a number of years.

“Birmingham and the wider West Midlands has not attracted anywhere near its fair share of inward investment during my time in property here, which has been the last 17 years. You can count the inward investors on the fingers of one hand, certainly in the city centre. It’s way below the city average across the UK,” he said. “The business community was really starting to agitate for a step change in how that message was taken to market.”

Rami said the success of the Birmingham visitor economy programme means that Marketing Birmingham can now concentrate some of its efforts on inward investment. “Now we have got a much stronger corporate conference market and we are on the political party conference circuit. So we were in a much stronger position to get the council to transform the (inward investment) function and to get the private sector to support us. Manchester and London are now looking at our model,” he said.

Marketing Birmingham is recruiting a new inward investment sales team. It will focus on areas identified by IBM as key targets for the city: financial services, shared services (such as HR), automotive (with the emphasis on new and green technology), public sector functions and emerging economies (such as digital media, low carbon and medical technologies). Business Birmingham will also try to make more of existing relationships with cities such as Chicago, Frankfurt and Lyon and indigenous relationships based on the city’s multi-ethnic population.

“Raising the profile is very important,” Rami said. “The Business Birmingham campaign will be very high profile. You will see it at all major airports and stations and across the national, trade and business press.”