llobregat

The first lab in Europe for certifying car industry products to be sold in China has been unveiled in L'Hospitalet del Llobregat, near Barcelona's seaport and El Prat Airport. The Chinese publicly-owned company CCIC Holding Group opened on Monday a lab in Greater Barcelona, which will also certify products from other industries, such as the textile industry, and the construction and chemical industries. As well as products from Europe, it will also certify products from Northern Africa and the Americas. The new plant will also facilitate companies from the Asian giant that wish to contact Western suppliers, becoming a bridge for fostering foreign investment. Therefore, it will turn Barcelona into one of the main gateways for exporting Western products to China. The project has been attracted by the Catalan Government's programme 'Invest in Catalonia', as well as by a trip to China made by the Mayor of Barcelona, Xavier Trias.

The 2015 Mobile World Congress, which takes place each year in Barcelona, has shattered the records by hosting more than 93,000 visitors from 200 different countries, as reported by event organiser GSMA on Thursday, the last day of the trade fair. Thisyear’s attendance exceeded by 9% the figures recorded in 2014 and by 45% the number of people who visited the event during its first edition in 2006. The 2015 Mobile World Congress confirmed itself as the global platform for the cell-phone-related industries, where a large number of news and products were unveiled for the first time by world-class companies such as Samsung, HTC, Sony, Microsoft and Google. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sundar Pichai (Google) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) were among this edition's main speakers.

The Chinese community welcomed the 'Year of the Goat' last week. The biggest New Year festivity took place this Saturday, when a parade of a thousand people filled the Barcelona streets with a trail of red dancing dragons and lions. This is the second year that Chinese organisations and Catalan folklore groups, such as Catalonia's traditional human tower builders (‘castellers’) and the traditional giant figures representing kings, knights and princesses called ‘gegants’, joined together to celebrate Chinese New Year. Almost 10,000 spectators lined the parade route through the streets of the Eixample district in the centre of the city. Barcelona has 17,400 Chinese inhabitants, the third largest foreign population, after the Pakistani and the Italian communities; however a great number of Chinese people live in the surrounding towns of Greater Barcelona.  

Barcelona’s office rental sector is improving after years of decline. Real estate company Inmobiliaria Colonial has set the tone by releasing 23 million new shares. Colonial is one of Europe’s leading companies in the office rental market and besides the new shares, they have also bought the main office of food multinational company Gallina Blanca. The property, positioned on L’Hopitalet del Llobregat’s Plaça Europa, one of Greater Barcelona’s business districts, has an area of almost 5,000 square metres and has been sold for €10.4 million. The shares and the purchase both belong to a new strategy to recover from the crisis and get the market back on track.

The multinational Catalan fragrance company Puig has won its perfume imitation lawsuit against Saphir, a company from Zaragoza dedicated to commercialising imitations of known fragrances. The Trademark Court from Alicante found Saphire guilty of “unfair competition” and ordered the Zaragozan company to remove its products from the market and destroy them. Puig accused Saphir of selling brands called ‘Saphir’, ‘Caravan’ and ‘IAP’ specifying that they were imitations of Carolina Herrera, Paco Rabanne and Nina Ricci, international brands run by Puig.

Barcelona’s main airport should be finally connected by underground railway by February 2016, after years of accumulated delays due to the economic crisis. Works in the stretch of the Line 9 that will connect Barcelona El Prat Airport with the rest of the metro network were completed months ago and now trains have started to circulate to run functioning trials. According to the announced schedule, passengers should be able to use this service as of February 2016, in time for the Mobile World Congress, which is the main event of the mobile phone industry at world level, which takes place each year in Barcelona. The Catalan Minister for Territory and Sustainability, Santi Vila, also announced that passengers travelling to and from the airport by metro will have an additional fee on top of the regular underground tariff. However the fee’s amount has not been announced yet. 

The Barcelona Metro will reach El Prat Airport by the first half of 2016, perhaps even earlier, according to forecasts announced on Wednesday by the President of the Catalan Government, Artur Mas. The L9 line connecting Barcelona municipality to El Prat Airport and other cities has been under construction since 2002, and was originally anticipated to open in 2008, but the financial crisis and the state of public finances have delayed its full completion. An initial stretch of the line became operational in 2009, located at the opposite end to the airport. Once fully finished, the underground line will consist of two branches spanning across the Barcelona metropolitan area, making it the longest automatic metro line in Europe. The entire project will represent a total investment of €16 billion, €3 billion of which is for the airport connection. The test phase of the airport stretch will begin this autumn and should be completed by early 2016 or earlier.

The Spanish telecommunications multinational Telefónica will open a new call centre to take care of consumer queries in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, a city literally attached to Barcelona's municipality. The new facilities will be operational from the 26^th of May. It will initially start with 50 workers but by November it will already employ 310 people. According to Kim Faura, Telefónica's Director for Catalonia, the company's strategy is to relocate call centres and place them near the areas where consumers live.  This new call centre will be Telefónica's fourth one in Catalonia and will focus on helping clients going through digital environments. Faura's aim is to make this centre Spain's flagship for this sort of issues.

The Catalan fashion and fragrance multinational Puig, which runs international brands such as Carolina Herrera, Nina Ricci, Paco Rabanne, Jean Paul Gaultier and Prada, has unveiled its new international headquarters, located in L'Hospitalet business district in Greater Barcelona. The tower has been designed by Rafael Moneo, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1996. The Catalan company has also presented its results for 2013, organising a press conference for the first time. Puig's turnover reached €1.499 billion last year, posting a net profit of €176 million, 2% more than in 2012. In addition, the multinational's CEO, Marc Puig, announced that the company aims to become the world's 3^rd largest luxury brand group by 2020. Currently it occupies 6^th position.

Japanese multinational Olympus, specialized in optics and reprography, has unveiled its new headquarters for Spain and Portugal, aimed at becoming its main centre for Southern Europe. The new facilities are located in the business district of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, a city literally attached to Barcelona, between the Catalan capital and El Prat Airport. The new offices occupy 2,500 square meters in a building on the Europa Square, close to the Fira de Barcelona. It will welcome 30 employees of the divisions of Consumer Product, Microscopy, Industry, and Medical Systems. Merging the headquarters for Spain and Portugal constitutes a step forward to gain weight on the Southern Europe market, said Olympus Iberia's CEO.

Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world’s biggest congress in the mobile phone industry, takes place from today until Thursday in Barcelona. The Catalan capital is hosting this event for the 9th consecutive year. More than 1,800 companies from all over the world showcase their latest products at the event and more than 77,000 visitors are anticipated at the conference centre at Fira Gran Via. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and new owner of Whatsapp, will follow today’s earlier speech by Whatsapp founder Jan Koum with his highly anticipated keynote talk. Virginia Rometty, IBM´s CEO and recently pronounced most powerful woman in Business, will also appear as a keynote speaker on Wednesday. Leading mobile phone companies such as Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Huawei, HTC and others are expected to launch their new devices at the exhibition.

Some 1,900 police officers, both from the Catalan Police Force (called Mossos d’Esquadra), and from the local polices of Barcelona and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat (Greater Barcelona), will ensure the safety of the 75,000 visitors expected to attend the Mobile World Congress, the main international event of the mobile-phone-related industry. This trade fair and conference takes place each year in Barcelona and the upcoming edition will run from the 24^th to the 27^th of February. With this safety reinforcement plan, plain-clothed police officers will be deployed in the pavilions of the Mobile World Congress, while the number of uniformed-police patrols will be increased to dissuade pickpockets. Furthermore, there will be more private security guards controlling the premises this year and a dedicated police station where attendees can report any loss or theft will be open all day long.

The civil society organisation Súmate, bringing together Spanish-speaking Catalans who support independence from Spain, presented its local branch in Mataró, a coastal city in Greater Barcelona. On Tuesday evening, half an hour after the event’s kick off, a group of about six Fascists carrying Spanish flags interrupted the presentation and tried to stop it. They shouted insults against participants and carried banners against the association. “You are a submarine” of pro-independence parties and “You are sold to the ‘nazionalist’ tyranny” were some of the slogans. Ironically, these Fascists called the attendees of a democratic debate on Catalan nationalism ‘Nazis’. Spanish nationalism has compared Catalonia’s claims to Nazism on several occasions, while Madrid’s establishment and intellectuals have barely protested. 

Next February, the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world’s most important event in the mobile industry, will open its doors in Barcelona for the 9^th consecutive year. The major companies in the sector will introduce new products or give conferences on applications designed for many innovative uses. By hosting the fair each year at least until 2018, Barcelona, named Mobile World Capital, is looking to become an international leader in this industry. The city has also created a HUB to develop the sector even further. The 2014 edition of the fair expects to break all records. The Director of the MWC, John Hoffman, stated that 75,000 visitors were expected, meaning 3,000 more than last year. Besides, once the fair will be over, it is estimated the local economy could have gained €340 million from it.

The language skills of Catalonia’s population to understand, read, speak and write in Catalan have reached record highs, according to a report from the Statistical Institute of Catalonia (Idescat) with data from 2011. That year, 95.2 % of the residents could understand Catalan, 79.1 % could read it, 73.2 % knew how to speak it, and 55.8 % knew how to write in this language. According to the Idescat figures, the foreign nationality population has registered the highest increases: 82.1 % of them stated they could understand Catalan in the 2011 survey, whereas, according to the previous census from 2001, only 61.1% of the foreign-born population had good language comprehension skills.