The Minister of Economy and the Sea said this Saturday, in Alcobaça, that a “country that does not recognize what it does well is a country more prone to doing things wrong.” António Costa Silva was speaking at the inauguration of the Montebelo Alcobaça Historic Hotel, in the Leiria district, regretting that in Portugal there is no “custom of recognizing the work of companies”.
“We are not in the habit of recognizing what we do well in our country. And for this reason, from the Ministry of Economy and the Sea, we are thinking of launching an initiative with our entire business system to we take the most extraordinary examples that we have in our country and make them more visible to Portuguese society”, revealed the minister.
Costa Silva reported that the Visabeira group, owner of the hotel, is “a multinational that operates in 18 different countries and exports to 133 markets.”
Speaking to Mozambique’s President, Filipe Nyusi, the Minister of the Economy and the Sea said he hoped his visit to Portugal could contribute to “attracting more and more attention from Portuguese businessmen to invest in Mozambique.”
“And attention, the Portugal’s relationship with Mozambique is not a relationship to help another country. We should ban the word aid when we talk to our African sister countries. Mozambique is today an importer of technologies and Portuguese companies can put these technologies on Mozambican soil, develop large business projects ”, he exemplified.
António Costa Silva also said that Mozambique needs investments “in the area of agribusiness, in the area of tourism, in the area of renewable energy, in the area of the economy of the sea.”
The president of the board of directors of the Visabeira group, Nuno Marques, highlighted that the company, which this year turned 42, “is experiencing a period of great splendor, estimating reaching a consolidated turnover of 1,500 million euros in 2022, approximately doubling the 2017 billing, which represents an average growth of 20% in the last five years”.
Of this turnover, “80% is obtained in the foreign market”, he explained, noting that “this strong growth is based on the value of 4,500 million euros of contracts in the portfolio that the group has to date”.
Nuno Marques also pointed out that the Visabeira group is “recognized as one of the main European ‘players’ in the provision of engineering services for telecommunications, electricity and gas networks”.
“We have the ‘know how’ [conhecimento] differentiated in the design, engineering, construction, operation and maintenance of network infrastructures, which allows us to position ourselves as a market leader and as an ideal partner for the main operators in the countries where we are present”, he revealed.
The official also reported that the “growth capacity” was recently “reinforced” with the partnership with Goldman Sachs, “which invested 200 million euros in the acquisition of a minority stake in the construction company Visabeira, brand and subsidiary of the group for the sector of telecommunications and energy in Europe and the United States of America”.
The Montebelo Alcobaça Historic Hotel was the object of a recovery work signed by the architect Eduardo Souto Moura. The hotel involved an investment of 24.5 million euros by the Visabeira Group and is the seventh of the Montebelo Hotels & Resorts chain in Portugal.
After the Alcobaça unit, the Montebelo Hotels & Resorts chain will inaugurate, in January 2023, a new hotel in Lisbon, in Chiado. The chain also owns six hotels and resorts in Mozambican territory.
Source: Observadora
