In honor of the president of Peru’s recent official visit to Spain, on March 1, the “Perú en la agenda Global” Forum was held at Madrid’s Casa América.
During the forum, led by Néstor Popolizio, Peru’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, the perspectives of Spanish companies on the Andean country were discussed in terms of the challenges and opportunities that his strategic agenda poses.
During the last few years, Peru has grown faster than the Latin American average, its middle class has grown, and it has become a motor of the Andean region. With a GDP growth rate near 4% and an infrastructure plan that forecasts $160 million of investments until the year 2025, Peru is an important market for Ferrovial.
In the presentation at this forum, Néstor Popolizio stated that the potential for bilateral agreements between Spain and Peru still has not been fully explored. As for Alejandro de la Joya (Cintra’s CEO), he remarked that Peru needs to invest in new infrastructure to continue growing, and that Ferrovial wants to get more involved in this country, saying.
“Peru has the right ingredients to become an important market. We’re seeing airport projects, highway projects. We’re going to invest in the future.”
Alejandro de la Joya continued by saying that, even though Ferrovial’s interest in investing in the country is high, we still need our first success story in Peru, stating that he expects that to be in 2019 or 2020.
“If we see that the project is profitable, we'll go further.”
Even though he recognized some of the difficulties in developing infrastructure in urban environments – as expropriations and affected services may be – de la Joya concluded that the Peruvian government is working on a good way to solve these problems.
Ferrovial opened an office in Peru as an opportunity to coinvest in projects with the government. Since then, it has invested in human capital and engineering, studying and analyzing various construction projects and grants.
Lastly, he indicated that Ferrovial has invested more than €1 million in development aid activities in Peru, from which 26,361 people have benefited.
