Introducing a corporate tax rate of 12 per cent early on in the discussions on the Corporate Tax Reform III has paid off for the canton of Zug. Even after the bill failed to pass, the canton has held on to this tax rate. And if the privileged treatment of state companies is eliminated, the canton of Zug will still be well represented internationally.
Zug’s demonstrable predictability is also appreciated by companies. As finance director Heinz Tännler toldthe Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper, a good number of international corporations decided to open operations in the canton of Zug in the first half of the year. In addition to the low taxes, industry representatives also named the availability of well-qualified employees as another of Zug’s appealing features.
According to a separate NZZ article, the canton of Zug has developed in recent years into a centre for the procurement of goods. The British-South African brewery group SAB Miller and Grundfos, a Danish industrial group specialising in pumps, would have chosen Zug as a location for global purchasing alone. Other corporations are also relocating their headquarters to Zug on purchasing grounds.
Its next major success has to do with the largest brewery group in the world, AB InBev: the group is planning to relocate its global procurement division from Belgium to Zug.
“Although a final decision has yet to be made according to the Zug authorities, it looks as though the multinational will have some 200 employees in an already standing building in Steinhausen,” the newspaper wrote.
There are no statistics as to how many people are now working in purchasing for companies in the canton of Zug, explained the article. “But as there are some 1,800 of these ‘mixed companies’, it is estimated that their number is easily in the five-digit range.”
