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Dear readers, We are sending you this newsletter to close year 2011 with good news of Nicaragua. First you will find the Tourism section, where Nicaragua has been positioned as one of the top value Destinations this year, you will also find a new option to relax, which is Finca Genizaros, a farm where you can stay and enjoy your vacations. We also glad to include a new option for tourism adventure, Skydive, this includes landing in Gran Pacifica as part of the program and some other news related to tourism. On the Economy and Investment side you will find articles of current and new entrepreneurs such as the Concentrix, The Pellas Group and Pantaleon Group. On a different subject, I invite you to join me on Offshore Radio Network show where I will be representing Nicaragua for 6 weeks, a couple hours per week. The first show will be on Jan. 2, 2012. On this issue you will find the details, please join me and learn more about Nicaragua. Until our next issue, we wish you a merry Christmas and a prosperous new year. Michael Cobb
Tourism: Nicaragua one of the top value destinations for 2011 Nicaragua was recently ranked as one of the top ten best value destinations for 2011 by Lonely Planet, one of the largest travel guide book and digital media publisher owned by BBC Worldwide. According to the website’s recent article, “Nicaragua is quickly becoming one of the most popular places to escape winter. Culture, adventure, sand and surf are all part of its cachet”. The article mentions the country offers tourist sites “nothing short of spectacular including hammock-hanging opportunities on the mythically unspoiled Corn Islands, bar-hopping and live music in colonial cities Leon and Granada, and volcano trekking on Ometepe Island”.
Want to learn more about Nicaragua? Tune into Expat Stories Revealed You can now tune into a weekly radio program where you’ll hear interviews with expats and other folks living in Nicaragua, cultural events, special programs, and other useful and timely information that can help you in your decision to visit or perhaps explore the idea of moving overseas. This is real insider information. Regular people living the life and now on the radio giving you the skinny on what it’s really like, warts and all. You’ll even have a chance to call in and ask questions.
Finca Genizaros Stays, a New Tourism option in Nicaragua A new tourism option is now open, Finca Genizaros Stays in now live and you can visit and enjoy it. Mrs. Janice Gallagher said: “we are pretty excited about this new venture”.
Skydive Nicaragua, Don’t Miss it! I hope you all had a great summer of jumping. I just returned from ten days in Nicaragua finalizing plans for the boogie. Nicaragua is a very amazing place. The lakes and volcanoes are beautiful and the ocean is warm with nice waves. The Nicaraguan people are friendly and welcoming. INTUR, the Nicaraguan Tourism Board, has gone above and beyond to help ensure a great boogie and vacation experience. There are a number of very important items to cover in this e-mail. Please look over this very carefully and keep it as a reference.
American Airlines “Business as Usual” On November 29th Nicaragua Dispatch received a surprise announcement that American Airlines’ parent company, AMR Corporation, was filed for bankruptcy will not affect the U.S. legacy carrier’s flight service to Nicaragua or Latin America, said Juan Gómez, AA’s country representative for Nicaragua.
Economy: IMF approves Nicaragua’s seventh review The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently completed the seventh and final review of Nicaragua’s economic performance under its Extended Credit Facility (ECF) arrangement. According the IMF, all quantitative performance criteria for June 2011 were met, and the structural agenda has developed as planned. Completion of the review allows for the final disbursement of US$8.74 million, totalizing disbursements to date of US$114.1 million.
Nicaragua with excellent economic performance in 2011 Nicaragua’s economic activity has shown high growth rates during 2011, according to the latest economic report published by the Central Bank of Nicaragua (BCN, for its acronym in Spanish). During the second quarter of 2011, the gross domestic product (GDP) grew 5.2 percent, which represents an increase of 3.1 percentage points when compared to the second quarter of 2010. BCN projections indicate that the Nicaragua economy will be growing 4 percent by the end of 2011. This projection is based mainly on a series of positive factors that include elevated prices of the country’s main export products, growth of the agribusiness and industrial sectors (including textiles), increase of private investment (national and foreign) and remittances.
New Car Sales up 18% in 2011 If it seems like there are a lot more new cars and trucks on the roads these days in Nicaragua, that’s because there are. The Nicaraguan Association of Automobile Distributors (ANDIVA) reports that imports of new vehicles increased by 18% in 2011, indicating a solid recovery for Nicaragua’s small but vibrant auto-dealer industry after the economic fender-bender of 2009, when new car sales plunged by 50 percent. Overall, Nicaragua still sells the fewest new vehicles in all of Central America. This year, only 8,500 new cars and trucks were imported into the country, and 800 of those were government imports of Russian Ladas and buses from Mexico.
Investment: Sugar Tycoon: Nicaragua is not as risky as it seems For the past five years, President Daniel Ortega has done an artful job of preventing his “socialist” political project from seriously interfering with Nicaragua’s free-market economy, which continues to grow under the Sandinistas’ watch. Yet following the Nov. 6 general elections, there is new concern that Ortega’s economic and political projects are starting to collide. The Nicaragua Dispatch asked a group of leading investors, economists and policy experts to analyze how sustainable the Sandinista economy is moving into 2012. Part I: Sugar magnate Julio Herrera, one of the largest foreign investors in Nicaragua, says Ortega’s bark is worse than his bite.
MANAGUA—One of Central America’s leading businessmen says Nicaragua’s conditions for business and investment are more favorable than they appear from a distance. While there are some doubts about what an emboldened President Daniel Ortega will do with unchecked power in his next term in office, there are also benefits to having a strong executive branch in a shaky Latin American country. “The perception is bad, the reality is not,” says Guatemalan sugar tycoon Julio Herrera Zevallos, president of the Pantaleón Group, Central America’s largest sugar-producing group. “I think (Ortega) is trying to develop the country one way or another, and that’s good,” Herrera told The Nicaragua Dispatch in a recent interview. “And he’s got the power to do it. Whereas in the other countries, like Europe and U.S., there is paralysis because of politics.”
CONCENTRIX invests in Nicaragua Concentrix, a global business service provider and wholly-owned subsidiary of SYNNEX Corporation (NYSE: SNX), recently announced it has established a world-class contact center in Nicaragua. This new facility, located in the country’s capital, has the capacity to house 60 service agents on its first phase and plans to increase to approximately 200 next year. The company’s operations in Nicaragua will include a broad span of services in customer retention such as customer service and customer win-backs; in customer renewals such as licensing and contract renewals, extended warranty sales, cross and up-sell and customer lifecycle management; and in customer acquisition such as demand generation and sales.
Pellas Project Raises Bar for Tourism
By Tim Rogers/ Nicaragua Dispatch TOLA—After several millennia of being suckled and shaped by Mother Nature, the windswept virgin shoreline of Nicaragua’s “Emerald Coast” is now under the guardianship of Grupo Pellas, which is carefully developing this pristine piece of land into what it promises will be Nicaragua’s—if not Central America’s—premier beach resort by the end of next year. Guacalito de la Isla, a $250 million tourism development tucked into the forested Pacific slope overlooking a series of unexplored coves that dimple the coastline, is being called a “game changer” for Nicaragua’s small yet feisty tourism sector. “We think that Guacalito de la Isla could be for Nicaragua what the Four Seasons was for Costa Rica,” said Carlos Pellas, the controlling shareholder of Grupo Pellas, one of Central America’s largest business conglomerates and the cleanup hitter for the Nicaraguan economy.
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