In this post we keep on telling our experience of the last trip of November.
Much to the delight of us, we were invited to two events by His Excellency, Miklós Tromler, Hungarian Ambassador to Morocco and his colleagues. On Wednesday evening, we participated a Piano Night, organized in the building of the Embassy, where Mónika Ruth Vida played the piano.
The other event organized by the Embassy was a fashion show in Sofitel Casablanca Tour Blanche Hotel, where we could admire Dóra Sármán fashion designer’s dresses.
Tableau at the Piano Night. His Excellency, Miklós Tromler, Hungarian Ambassador to Morocco and our little team
We had pretty much fun, had opportunity to meet the diplomatists of the Embassy, who are really nice and open people.
In the weekend we have met József Dr. Steier and his wife in the frame of a lunch, in Marrakech. Mr. Steier, as the representative of the Hungarian National Trading House (HNTH), organized a meeting with Hamza Maristani, one of the owners of Wiki Box, who presented us some of their developments, and offered us the lease-work background even for outsourced, individual cases. Moreover, according to Mr. Steier’s suggestion, when thinking long-term, it would be more useful to buy or lease a villa in the name of the freshly-opened Moroccan company, financed by a Moroccan bank loan.
Our next stop with the Hungarian (HCCI) and the Budapest Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) delegation was a meeting in Casablanca, CRI, where József dr. Steier suggested us, that by the company set-up we have the opportunity to ask for a land from the Moroccan authorities for the purpose of going green, so that we could be the first foreign ICT company, who is in the Zero CO2 Emission in Morocco. Furthermore, the HTNH-HTCC-Sunwo has offered us, that they could undertake the green-going (afforestation), and hereby we could gain more advantage, as well (e.g. Carbo quota).
The office issue:
Luckily, the office-issue is the biggest problem we are facing in Morocco, and we hope we are not going to have biggest problem in the future neither. There are willing real estate offices around, but we had no idea about the local conditions, so could not decide, what kind of real estate we are going to rent. The basic idea was what we also did in Montenegro connected to our other company: rent an office + an apartment because of a potential longer stay. We can also be registered under the address of the apartment, which is an important administrative issue for the future Hungarian manager of the company, because of the work permit.
The office + apartment would cost about 3000€/month, in addition, the offices did not really convince us. We were not very satisfied with the supply and the best value for money.
Fortunately, we figured out that we can also rent beautiful villas, broadly on the price and quality of an office. Needless to say that a 100 square meter office-block office cannot really compete with a two-storied, 500 square meter villa with a garden and palm trees, when both cost the same.
The only lion in the way is that a real estate cannot have two roles, commercial real estate and residential property at the same time. That’s why we have to look for a rent, as well.
Currently we are waiting for offers and hope to find the optimal rents.
Further plans:
We are going to travel to Morocco around 23d January again, when hopefully the company will be already set up and we will be able to hire the local manager and sign the contracts related to the rents.
We also start hiring the programmers, and on 20th February the training can finally begin, and we can start swimming in deep water.
