Last week heralded the official start to Malta Enterprise. Someone might exclaim: "About time too!" And who would blame him?

The raison d'être for Malta Enterprise may be found in the statement made by the prime minister way back in 1987 when he said that we need to give a start to the concept of Malta Inc. It was a statement that everyone agreed with and to which everyone in his or her own way sought to give a practical dimension. Unfortunately, we did not always succeed in projecting this uniform image of Malta Inc., very often because of the silo mentality that is still too prevalent in this country.

Honours must go to Josef Bonnici, former minister of economic services, who had come up with the concept of Malta Enterprise. I got to know of it immediately I assumed the role of chairman of the Malta Development Corporation. There was support for it from all quarters, although the problem was how to put such an idea into practice when everyone else was too busy with one's own job.

This gave rise to a working group resourced and financed by the three agencies that were eventually to fold into Malta Enterprise; namely the MDC, the Malta Export and Trade Corporation and the Institute for the Promotion of Small Enterprises.

Concurrently, a board of advisers was set up by the minister. This board was composed mainly of Maltese persons or persons of Maltese descent living abroad and working in the business sector.

We have often heard of the Maltese who leave their mark in the medical sector or in the arts. However, very little attention has been given to those that have been successful in the manufacturing, trade or financial sectors.

This board of advisers gave its own ideas on how to continue developing the concept of Malta Enterprise and how such a concept could be made to work in today's reality of foreign direct investment.

That was a very important part of the exercise as the primary objective of Malta Enterprise is to attract investment through a range of services starting from the provision of investment incentives to the practical support that needs to be given to the entrepreneur while setting up and after setting up, be it in export promotion or the acquiring of licences from government departments. Equally important is the availability of information that can be transformed into knowledge, especially about Malta's competitiveness, to be able to serve customers better.

The relationship between the concept of Malta Enterprise and the concept of Malta Inc. is that Malta needs to be promoted in a consistent fashion with investors (for example its export potential is just as important as the provision of industrial premises and as such cannot be left to different organisations) and that economic development can only be generated if we generate a spirit of enterprise in the country. Nothing new in effect; countries like Ireland have been at it for a number of years and have been very successful as well.

Therefore, the agenda that Malta Enterprise has is quite a tall one. This is especially so when one considers the competition we are facing for foreign direct investment. Fifteen years ago, China was still an unknown quantity; the Berlin Wall was still a big impediment for investment flows into Eastern Europe; Latin America was still plagued by significant political uncertainty; the Far Eastern countries (with the exception of Singapore) as well as North African countries were not as aggressive as they are today in attracting foreign investment.

Today, we no longer enjoy this advantage. Moreover, today foreign investment flows much more freely than it used to in the past and relocation of investment is the order of the day.

However, Malta Enterprise is not starting from scratch in a number of areas. Although one reads all too often that investment has been drying up in recent years, the last three years have been marked by three important achievements. First, in spite of the international economic slowdown, we have managed to hold our own with regard to employment in the manufacturing sector. This has been mainly due to the fact that a number of companies that have long been established in this country decided either to consolidate their operations here or even to expand them.

The second and third achievements can be grouped together. For the first time, at MDC there was a decision to do away with mass marketing activities and these were replaced by a concerted effort to market Malta directly to specific companies in two sectors, namely the pharmaceutical sector and the automotive sector.

There has been a discrete flow of investment in these two sectors in the last 24 months, and I believe that now Malta is recognised internationally as an important location for investment in the pharmaceutical sector.

The interesting point about the automotive sector is that the investment that has been attracted has been in specialised segments.

The future beckons! The type of investment that will be attracted to Malta shall depend greatly on Malta Enterprise and we have to appreciate that they are the experts at it. No matter what some may think, attracting foreign investment is no easy job. Malta Enterprise is an organisation that belongs to us all and it is in everyone's interest that it does a good job.