Lausanne, a decision-making centre for the world economy

World Trade Center © www.diapo.ch

Philip Morris © www.diapo.ch

Company headquarters

Lausanne and the surrounding region make up an area with around 250,000 inhabitants. The headquarters of Nestlé, the largest agro-food company in the world, are just 20 kilometres (12½ miles) away and the company’s research centre is actually inside the city limits. Philip Morris, another food and tobacco giant, has its international management concentrated in Lausanne (for all operations outside the USA). Tetra-Laval, a company of Swedish origin working in the field of fine chemistry, energy and a leader in the packaging of liquids, also has its world headquarters in the area. The Financial Company Tradition, the third largest broker in the world for financial products also runs its operations from our city.

Expanding businesses

The region has been the birthplace of companies which have acquired an international stature. Edipresse is one of the largest of Swiss publishers. The company owns more than 70 newspapers in France, in Spain, in Portugal, in Greece, in Poland and in Rumania. In the new technologies, Kudelski is one of the world leaders in television decoders and Logitech dominates the computer peripherals market (mice, webcams, joysticks). These companies are small multinationals whose development and manufacturing units are dotted all over the world, but they were created in the Lausanne region which is still home to their management and research centres.

Cutting edge technology

The city of Lausanne is home to the Ecole polytechnique fédérale (EPFL – Federal Polytechnic) whose strategic orientation towards bio-technologies working in collaboration with the University of Lausanne(UNIL) and the research teams at the Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois (CHUV – Vaud Region University Hospital) leads to the creation or establishing of many companies operating in this sector. A science park houses an increasing number of large companies who have come out of these prestigious schools. Micro-technology and information technologies are also one of the first-choice fields of operation for the many start-ups to be found all over the region.

Infrastructures

Businesses find that Lausanne has all the infrastructure that they need: business lawyers, local offices of the largest auditing and consultancy companies (Ernst & Young, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, etc.). The city is also home to the headquarters of the five largest commercial banks in the country, the BCV(Banque Cantonale Vaudoise) which has subsidiaries abroad and a large insurance company, Vaudoise assurances. The great Swiss banks all have large local headquarters and the business banks of Geneva are only 60 kilometres (37½ miles) away. There is also a very busy conference centre in Lausanne hosting many events every year. The hotel industry is also very highly developed and customers are divided between tourism and business.

The material conditions are excellent with top level telecommunications networks, an international airport (Geneva-Cointrin) 60 kilometres (37½ miles) away, the train network is – together with the Japanese system – the densest on the planet and there is a motorway system spreading out in all directions.

Men and women

Lausanne is not a big capital city, it is not the main business city in Switzerland, but it does offer all the services to be found in a large city along with highly educated men and women who are used to speaking various different languages and who are cosmopolitan in outlook – many of them have studied and worked in other countries. It is these people who make this average-sized city into a decision-making centre in the great network of the world economy.