Jakub Kodr of CTP: Czechia lacks hunger for foreign investors

Jakub Kodr, chief executive of the Czech arm of developer CTP, believes Czechia has everything it needs to attract investors, except an authority willing to fight for them. Speaking at the Forbes “Best Czechia” conference, he compared the country with its neighbors: Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, he said, act far more actively.

CTP is one of Europe’s largest developers of industrial property, and it grew up in Czechia. Its founder is Dutch billionaire Remon Vos, the world’s 520th richest person. After the fall of the Iron Curtain he moved from the Netherlands to Czechia at the age of twenty and built a giant here. Kodr joined the company at 26, and his interview with Vos took about two minutes. “When two people with ADHD meet, they do not last long together. I am fairly quick, and he is ten times quicker,” Kodr recalls with a laugh. In his words, Vos is a “nuclear power plant of energy”: incredibly smart, fast and thinking twenty steps ahead. Kodr became CTP’s chief executive in Czechia last year.

The numbers and the plans

The company is growing as fast as its founder moves. CTP recently entered Vietnam and now operates in twelve countries; by 2030 it plans to expand into North America and Africa. Last year its revenue was €278.9 million (about 6.7 billion crowns), and in the first half of this year it signed 55% more leases than a year earlier. Its clients include DHL, H&M, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Wistron and Rohlík. Of a market of roughly 13 million square meters, CTP owns five million, about seven hundred football fields.

What holds Czechia back

In Czechia itself, CTP’s business is not growing as fast as in Poland or Romania. Kodr says the country has all the trumps: geography, a stable political position, security, and excellent workers and university graduates. What gets in the way are lengthy construction permit procedures, “as anyone who has built a house, a garage or registered a garden with a wine press knows,” and a lack of “hunger” among the government and officials who should be attracting investors. “We have to make an effort so the train does not leave Czechia behind,” he warns. At the same time, Kodr rejects the image of Czechia as a country of assembly plants: because of expensive labor, such production has moved to Turkey, Serbia and Bulgaria.

A bet on startups

CTP is also moving beyond development: this year it invested in the JIC Ventures fund, created at the JIC innovation agency and the South Moravian Region. The fund totals 400 million crowns, with CTP contributing about 40 million. “We are grateful to Brno for CTP’s success, so the decision was easy. It is fantastic that something like this is starting to happen in Czechia,” Kodr says. The fund will focus on pre-seed and seed-stage startups and plans to invest in about two dozen technology companies over four years.

By the Around Prague newsroom