During the national holiday on October 11, 2016, the leader of VMRO-DPMNE, Nikola Gruevski, on his Facebook profile, announced the foreign investment of CeraMetal, a Greek company.
He reported that the company from Athens was to build a factory in Zhabeni, Bitola, where it will produce metal structures and welding materials used in the energy and construction sector.
Gruevski explained that the first phase would employ about 150 employees and that the company would invest five million euros. He added that the project would finish by employing "600 jobless people," with a total investment of 12 million euros.
The company has already bought 45,000 square meters of land in the industrial area.
"This will be a significant boost to the economy, and it will provide new jobs in Bitola and the region," Gruevski wrote on Facebook.
The Minister for Foreign Investments, Jerry Naumoff, for TV Nova stated that the products of the Greek company would mostly be exported to the German market, almost 40 per cent of them, while the rest would be exported to Spain, Canada, Brazil, Japan and other countries.
The Greek company, in 2016, opened a company in Bitola under the name CeraMetal, however, given that it has no financial statement for the year, we do not have official data on its investments and the number of employees in this short period of time since it was announced.