The president of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, has highlighted that the Canary Islands have multiple economic, fiscal, technical and quality of life attractions to invest in computerization and new technologies.
A digital infrastructure "already consolidated", which guarantees data storage capacity; connectivity in all its dimensions; qualified personnel and development plans in this area already approved and with public funding; and a Canary Digital Agenda in progress are the incentives that the archipelago has so that national and international investors bet on it.
Likewise, as confirmed on December 13 after the meeting of the Canary Islands president with the first vice president of the Government of Spain and Minister of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, three projects of the state program Retech are also part of these attractions, initiatives that work on the relationship between tourism and digitization to provide cybersecurity to island companies that cannot afford it, especially in the services and construction sectors.
The center of commerce and digitization in the mid-Atlantic
The Canary Islands president has highlighted that the region is already the most important center of digital activity in the mid-Atlantic and its key position between three continents only reinforces its attractions for investment in the digital economy.
"We make it easy because the technical level is maximum and because our fiscal and economic attractions for companies, due to our Economic and Fiscal Regime, unique in the EU, are among the most competitive worldwide," Torres said.
In addition, he has remarked on the availability in the islands of "state-of-the-art technical means, maximum security in all areas and total guarantees in the deployment of investments", which makes the archipelago an "ideal space as a destination for investments and as a support for the development of global services and digital services to the rest of the world".
"We can give all that looking at Europe, where we are integrated, to Africa and America because we are perfectly connected in this wide three-continental space," he added.
For the president, the Canary Islands have tools, potential and surplus socioeconomic and environmental advantages to become a leading investment focus in this field, continue to grow strongly in the unstoppable global digitization and deepen the diversification of its economy, which has been boosted as never before in the last three years.
Proof of this is that the subsector that has grown the most in employment since 2019 is computer programming (which amalgamates a 41% increase).
2023, a year of new opportunities
Beyond this, Torres has also stressed the importance of the presidency of the Outermost Regions (ORs) that the Canary Islands has already held since last November coinciding, from the second half of 2023, with the Spanish presidency of the European Union, "which will surely give a great boost to public and private initiatives related to the digital economy".
In his opinion, "2023 will be a year of new opportunities for Spain, the Canary Islands and the European Union": "The islands must take advantage of them and intensify the progress they have made so far in the new economies, those productive activities that rely on digital development and, above all, on tourism services, in which we are world leaders," he added.
Torres offered these statements during the opening of the D9 group forum held on December 16 in Gran Canaria, which brought together many of the most digitized countries in Europe, such as Belgium, Spain, Estonia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Sweden.
