INTEGRA NETWORK

Integra is an operational network of Service centres specialized in supporting enterprises in the field of internationalisation.

It is a wide and consolidated network. It is wide since it includes 23 Mediterranean, Near and Middle East and Balkan countries. It is consolidated since it has been working and dialoguing for more than two years by sharing information, methodologies and professional standards.

The countries belonging to the network are the following:

• Mediterranean Basin, Middle and Near East countries: Algeria, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Mauritania, Morocco, Palestine National Authority, Syria, Tunisia,  Turkey; 
  
• Balkan Area: Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Romania, Croatia, Kosovo,   Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro Union, Slovenia.

• In 2002 the Integra network launched its activities and achieved a complex and articulated series of results, showing its potentials and fields of action:

1. Creation of a network whose dimension and quality and reliability characteristics offered businessmen a large number of points of reference through which achieving business promotion and receiving assistance in each of the participant countries;

2. Implementation of informative products concerning the countries:

• Sector studies (carried out in the following sectors: agro-industry, honey, mineral extraction, cement, electric, textile, information technology, tourism; clothing, agricultural machinery, wood panelling materials, timber);
  
• Country profiles, containing information on: macro-economy; foreign investments; corporate law; customs procedures; taxation; export and financing, besides information on the main structures and service centres such as industrial associations, chambers of commerce, etc., an don the main service providers such as banks, insurance companies, legal and financial consultants, auditors, etc.; costs of the main productive processes like water, energy sources, lands and buildings, labour force, telecommunications, etc.
  
• Updated information on subsidies, events, territorial promotion initiatives, partnerships between enterprises;

3. Identification of business opportunities between Italian and foreign enterprises – also spread through the network web site - in particular in the agricultural and food sector (production of fruit juices; packaging; wine and oil production; production of sweets; meat and fish processing).

The proposals mainly concerned the search for business counterparts for the export or import of finished products and raw materials, search for partners for establishing joint-ventures, subcontracting, exchange of technology and know how, representation as agents and distributors throughout the territory.

4. Exchange of knowledge between foreign and Italian service centres and deepening of mutual economic-productive potentials, which laid the basis for the development of project initiatives, cooperation relations and agreements.