Moldova Puts Existing Investors at the Center of Its Investment Strategy

Moldova's investment approach has changed over the past year, Investment Agency Director General Natalia Bejan told Logos Press in an interview published September 28. The agency is looking more closely at what happens to companies already operating in the country, not only at how many new investors it can attract.

The starting evidence is unusually blunt. Bejan said Moldova received about €410 million in net foreign investment in 2025 and that more than 95% came from reinvested profits by existing foreign companies. That share does not show what the agency caused, and a national flow is not an aftercare performance measure. It does show why an attraction system that stops at the first investment would miss most of the capital entering the country.

Bejan described three connected priorities: help existing investors see a path to expansion; recruit new export-oriented manufacturers and service firms; and remove practical barriers in infrastructure, workforce, and logistics. She also gave current examples. A Romanian fiberglass producer has expanded in Moldova while reducing part of its Romanian production. A Ukrainian poultry-processing project worth about €20 million has identified a site and is preparing its legal and trade arrangements. Those are different project types, but both require casework after initial interest.

The agency's approach changes the role of aftercare. It is not only a courtesy call or a satisfaction survey. An operating company can produce four things an investment team needs: an expansion project, evidence about which constraints matter, links to other firms, and a credible account of the location. Bejan said businesses trust one another more than a state presentation. That makes an existing investor part client, part source of market intelligence, and part reference, provided the agency does not turn the relationship into an endorsement the company never agreed to give.

This creates a different portfolio discipline. A conventional attraction pipeline records prospects, visits, proposals, decisions, and announced capital. An aftercare-centered pipeline also needs to record the local operation, current suppliers, workforce constraints, infrastructure dependencies, management's next decision, and the date when expansion becomes plausible. The case manager is not waiting for a complaint. The job is to identify a decision early enough that the agency can assemble a site, training response, permit route, or supplier solution before another location does.

There is a risk in reading too much into the interview. Moldova has not published a service standard, account-management model, caseload, referral protocol, or separate results for retention and expansion work. The examples show what the agency is pursuing, not a measured conversion rate. The reinvested-profit figure may also reflect profitable firms retaining earnings for reasons unrelated to agency service. A stated priority becomes an operating model only when staff time, case ownership, and management information follow it.

The measurement problem is manageable. The agency can separate retained operations, expansions, and new investments; record the constraint attached to each active case; and report how many projects moved after a documented intervention. It can also track investor referrals without claiming every referred inquiry as a win. Those records would let managers judge whether aftercare is finding real decisions earlier or merely producing more meetings with companies already inclined to stay.

Moldova's most useful contribution is the order of work. Start with the firms that are already making location decisions, learn what would allow the next one, and use their experience to sharpen the proposition offered to new investors. In Bejan's account, the agency is now working with an identified Ukrainian poultry processor on a site and the legal and foreign-trade steps required before production can begin.