Costa Rica Courts Atlanta Buyers in Bid to Raise Profile in Southeast U.S. 

Costa Rica’s top trade promotion agency is courting Atlanta companies for a key September fair in San Jose, offering on-the-ground assistance and cost mitigation for local buyers or investors looking to deepen ties in the Central American nation. 

The move by PROCOMER, or Promotora del Comercio Exterior de Costa Rica, is part of a broader effort to expand the organization’s reach in the Southeast U.S. 

“The Carolinas and the Georgia area have not been very developed. If we had some customers from this area, it was because they went down to Miami to look for us,” Jose Pablo Segura, ProComer’s business development representative in North Carolina, told Global Atlanta. 

PROCOMER is working with The Shared World, a local consultancy founded by the city’s former international affairs director, Vanessa Ibarra, to recruit companies for the Sept. 1-5 Costa Rica Trade & Investment Summit. 

Eligible firms will not only receive help from PROCOMER in setting up meetings and engagements, but also can qualify to have their entry fees waived and hotels and ground transportation compensated. They would only need to pay for flights to San Jose. 

Costa Rica’s reputation, Mr. Segura said, is beginning to change given its rising profile in industries far beyond tourism and agriculture, where it is still a major player in pineapple, cassava and especially bananas and specialty coffee.

Tourists come for the volcanoes and beaches, Mr. Segura said, but end up discovering an unexpectedly strong business ecosystem that shatters stereotypes about the value-added manufacturing and services achievable in Central America. 

For five years running, for instance, Costa Rica’s top export product has been medical devices, accounting for about 48 percent of outbound trade value, Mr. Segura said. 

Technology and services are also major contributors to the economy, with a particular focus on not just call centers and back-office operations, but increasingly the R&D and core software behind complex sectors that dovetail well with Atlanta’s key industries, like financial services. 

Atlanta-based Equifax has more than 2,000 employees at its center of excellence in Costa Rica, which started as a small operation in 1995. Companies like Sykes Enterprises, a Tampa-based provider of BPO services, had steadily expanded in Costa Rica, employing more than 5,000 when it was acquired by Sitel Group and merged into Foundever. And these are just a few success stories. Mr. Segura also pointed to GBM, a software development firm that helps banks integrate information across platforms, as another example of Costa Rica welcoming global innovators.

More recently, with global trade tensions rising and near-shoring gaining momentum, Costa Rica has begun to pick up more contract manufacturing, carving out a niche in injection molding, light assembly and R&D and prototyping. 

PROCOMER, with 500 employees, 40 offices around the world and outposts in each province of the country, offers itself as a navigational tool to help investors understand a diverse market offering various incentives and specialized free-trade and industrial zones. 

“We’ve been renowned almost eight times now as the best government trade agency by the United Nations in the last eight years,” Mr. Segura said. 

Two Atlanta companies, Emrgy and Lowe Engineers, have committed to joining the September conference, and Mr. Segura hopes more are poised to gain a deeper understanding of his country. 

“When I’ve gone to companies and done the initial pitch, they say, ‘Oh, I was in Costa Rica 3-5 years ago and it was beautiful,’” he said. 

The key will be to convert that favorable reputation into investment dollars. 

“There’s so much more to Costa Rica than its beaches and volcanoes.” 

Learn more and register at https://costaricasummit.com/en.
For more information, contact Jose Pablo Segura at jsegurac@procomer.com or by phone at +1 (786) 860-0131.