In welcoming the Truttenbach family to Bahrain, the Minister paid tribute to the founder of RMA, Siegfried Truttenbach and to his son Andreas Truttenbach the current Managing Director.
RMA has now grown to include five plants—two in Germany, one in Poland, one in Russia and this new facility in Bahrain and now employs over 500 people
RMA designs and manufactures special valves, inspection traps, tee fittings and fasteners for oil pipelines and has customers in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Middle East Region.
The company will invest over $12million in this facility and provide 50 highly skilled jobs at the end of phase one and an additional 50 jobs will be provided at the end of phase two of the project.
The Minister referred to the relationship that Bahrain has developed with Germany and remarked that four German companies were already in operation here with two more companies due to commence operations by year end.
He spoke of the visit of His Majesty King Hamad to Germany in 2008 and the visit Chancellor Merkel visited Bahrain in 2010.and the regular visits to Bahrain of former Chancellor Schroeder.
He also welcomed to Bahrain the visiting industrialists from Potsdam Chamber of Commerce led by Dr. Victor Stimming and Rene Kohl
Dr Fakhro said that there are now 38 companies operational here at the Park, employing over 2,000 people and almost half of these companies are from overseas.
They come from Germany, USA, UK, France, Singapore, Japan, India, Lebanon, Jordan and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Between them these companies are investing BD127million ($ 337 Dollars) and almost 60% of the this investment is coming from foreign companies
A further 42 companies are at different stages of development, —-some under construction, some with signed leases and others finalizing their leases.
These companies will invest a further BD350milion (about one billion dollars) at the Park and over 80% of this total will come from foreign companies.
The Bahrain International Investment Park was established in 2005 with two key objectives i.e. to build a facility to the highest international standards and creating an environment capable of attracting and supporting Middle East operations for the leading manufacturing companies in the world.
The Minister added that he was pleased that both of these objectives were now being achieved.