Aristóteles Sandoval Díaz was accompanied on his trip by the head of the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology (SICyT), Jaime Reyes Robles, as the pair also met with other high tech companies within the silicon valley area.
Some will see this visit as a much needed positive development for the Ciudad Creativa Digital project, which has been slow to get off the ground. Announced in November 2011 by President Calderón and sponsored by Mexico’s national government, the project has been touted as the largest multimedia infrastructure project in Latin America and promises to create around 25,000 jobs. Guadalajara beat off competition from 11 other Mexican cities to host the site, which is earmarked for the rundown area around Parque Morelos in the city center.
It is expected that local companies will be most abundant at the site, but state officials are also actively seeking partnerships with big international corporations. An earlier trip saw Guadalajara city hall trade representatives travel to India where they said 30 companies expressed an interest in joining the project.
But despite all the early hype, the only major international company to so far commit to a presence at the technology hub is the German company Bosch. The electronics and engineering corporation plans to invest five million dollars in establishing a 1,800-square-meter IT location that is slated to open in 2016, as reported in this newspaper earlier this year.
At the time The Reporter went to print, it was not clear whether any further commitments have been added as a result of the meetings in California. But Reyes Robles was positive about the outcome of his conversations with Apple. “We are very pleased because we have something solid to work with, and also something that can, or should, solve many of the problems that we have in the state of Jalisco,” he said.
The meeting with Apple took place on Tuesday and later that day the two Jalisco politicians met with representatives from Hewlett Packard (HP), the information technology company that already has two offices in Guadalajara. One of the things discussed was the idea of HP transferring some of its new inventions from its labs to local universities for further development. It is also hoped that the applications of these new information technologies could help local small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to become more competitive internationally.
Other stop offs on their mini tour of San José included meetings with representatives of electronics manufacturing companies Jabil, Flextronics, Sanmina and IBM, all of which operate large plants in Jalisco. Also on the schedule was a meeting with the networking equipment company, Cisco, which last week agreed to act as consultants on the Ciudad Creativa Digital project.