In around five weeks, the First Minister will host her much-vaunted international investment summit at the ICC Wales in Newport.
Who is attending and what projects will be pitched as investment-ready, has yet to be made public.
However, the First Minister has rightly decided to keep it a small and focused affair for a summit that will attract a number of investors not currently active in Wales (around 60% of attendees). Little would be gained from inviting familiar faces from ‘Team Wales.’
But what does Wales have that could offer prospective investors returns that would match or outperform investing in other asset classes?
If you look at what is investable in Wales - and firms seeking growth capital can easily fund investors with capital to deploy - how many projects have planning approval and are of significant scale to attract collectively billions in investment?
This will be the challenge for the First Minister and her officials. Just identifying, say, property investment opportunities in Swansea and Cardiff will hardly set the summit alight - besides, these types of opportunities are already well signposted.
While there are no direct returns from investing in rail, there could be a pitch made for investment around new stations and existing ones as part of the £1bn Valley Lines electrification project. The added value from the Metro should be around new housing, office, retail, or leisure developments in close proximity to stations benefitting from turn-up-and-go train services. Perhaps a trick has been missed by not establishing a sort of Metro development company to have already highlighted such opportunities.
While the Global Centre of Rail Excellence project planned for the Dulais Valley has attracted interest from the private sector, they are not willing to commit at the required level, leaving the Welsh Government, as it stands, facing having to plough more of its own funding into it. The summit will offer an opportunity - and while again already on the marketplace - to attract investment in energy and data centres on the 500-hectare site, for which land deals could help close the current funding gap for the £400m project.
However, the truth is, there is a paucity of shovel-ready major projects in Wales, while granted the multi-faceted compound semiconductor cluster in south Wales is seeing significant investment and potential for far more.
One standalone project with huge potential is the Cardiff Parkway train station and integrated business park at St Mellons. What is encouraging, while at this stage it cannot commit to any investment, is that engineering giant Rolls-Royce has appraised the site as ticking all the right boxes for potential new investment at scale - building on its new satellite office nearby from its submarine division.
The prospects for investment, with the potential to create thousands of high-skilled jobs, have improved under the First Minister’s leadership and also with buy-in across º£½ÇÊÓƵ Government departments. A decision ultimately rests with the º£½ÇÊÓƵ Government as a key customer and Rolls-Royce as its supplier.
That decision will not require any external investment, but that the º£½ÇÊÓƵ Government funds the required rail corridor investment, such as the slewing of the existing South Wales Mainline needed to deliver a four-platform station. Whether an agreement in principle can be reached is yet to be seen, but it would certainly be timely if struck ahead of the investment summit, or from a PR perspective, confirmed on the day.
Of course there will be discussions initiated at the summit that could take a number of years to see tangible results. There will also be an element of spin with investments already agreed kept back to bolster the impact of the summit.
The First Minister really should have attended the recent state banquet in honour of US president Donald Trump, where many of the world's leading tech figures were also present.
Investors and companies at the Welsh summit might not be of the same standing, but getting them in the same room and putting up a Wales is open for business sign up, has to be a positive.
