Next month, a group of high-ranking Fulton County leaders are heading to India to meet with business owners and tell them why the county is a good place to set up shop, Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts announced Thursday.
Pitts along with Kwanza Hall, the new chair of the Development Authority of Fulton County, and officials from the cities of South Fulton, College Park, East Point, Union City and Fairburn will travel across multiple cities in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu from Oct. 18 to Oct. 22. A few businesses from the southern part of the county will also be joining, though they have not yet been finalized, Pitts said.
Pitts said the focus of the trip is to bring development to the southern part of Fulton County, because the north is “pretty much already developed.”
But in order to attract businesses, “they first have to know that there is such a place as Fulton County, Georgia,” Pitts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
One of his main goals of the trip is to do just that — telling Indian industry leaders about the county overall and what makes it attractive for business. The officials will be traveling to Coimbatore, a manufacturing hub; Tirupur, a knitwear exporter; and Ooty, a major spice producer.
Credit: Ben Gray
Credit: Ben Gray
The trip is being facilitated by the Georgia Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (GIACC), a nonprofit chamber that is working to strengthen business relationships between the U.S. and India, two of the largest economies in the world, with a particular focus on Georgia. Fulton County, the city governments and the development authority are covering the costs for their representatives to attend.
“I think reinvigorating the manufacturing, the logistics and the tech hub that we have down in the Southside could be really interesting, especially if we can incentivize the companies that are in your network to actually come here, set up offices and utilize all the financing tools that we have at the development authority,” Hall said Thursday at a news conference with Pitts and GIACC officials.
The GIACC brought more than 50 Indian CEOs and business leaders from Coimbatore to Atlanta in the spring. Since that trip at least one Indian business, air pollution control manufacturer Unicon Engineers, has established a presence in Fulton County and seven more are in the process of doing so, according to SK Raj, a GIACC board member.
Last year, the chamber set up a trade office in Coimbatore to promote doing business in Georgia and Raj said part of the office will now be dedicated to promoting Fulton County.
The GIACC plans to bring a delegation of Georgia business owners to Coimbatore next February.
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