Kenya has beaten economic giants Nigeria and South Africa to emerge as the top investment destination for African CEOs.
Why every top African CEO wants a piece of Kenya
The survey saw Kenya topple economic giants like Nigeria and South Africa
The survey carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) termed the country’s improving infrastructure, big pool of skilled workers and young population as the CEOs’ main attraction.
A PwC official involved in the study said a number of the top executives interviewed alluded to the fact that the Kenyan market has a huge potential for new products and services.
Furthermore, the country’s stability and predictability of its macro-economic variables suits businesses in enabling them plan their operations.
Of the 80 CEOs interviewed by PwC for The Africa Business Agenda 2017, 10 executives ranked South Africa as the 2 favorite investment hub while eight of them put Nigeria in 3 position.
Kenya topped the chart with eleven CEOs picking the country as the most important for their firms’ overall growth.
The review comes at a time when many multinational firms are setting shop in Nairobi. This includes General Electric, Google, IBM, Visa International, Pepsi and Foton.
Multinationals targeting the 180-million-people-strong East African common market are keen to establish regional hubs in Kenya to take advantage of the trade area that allows free movement of goods, people and capital.
However, a majority of the executives interviewed, half of whom were East African, identified Kenya as the most challenging when it comes to tax administration.
The PwC survey was conducted between September and November 2016 and is part of its global research which analyses responses from 1,379 CEOs.
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