Echelon Magazine - November 2022

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What’s special about special economic zones

The history of special economic zones (SEZ) isn’t all runaway successes. On paper, they create within an area with physical boundaries, a zone where everything that’s investor unfriendly is suspended or blunted. Often such areas will include better infrastructure, lower taxes and tariff and regulatory incentives unavailable in the rest of the county. Two types of SEZs exist, those oriented towards manufacturing and the second type geared toward services. Sri Lanka’s Free Trade Zones were designed to host manufacturing firms whereas its Colombo Port City is an SEZ designed for services. SEZs offer an opportunity to experiment with a new regime and tweak it before rolling out its best parts to the rest of the country.

China’s creation in 1980 of its Shenzhen SEZ is the poster boy for potential after its success in transforming a landscape of small fishing villages into one of the world's most dynamic economies. However, not all SEZs are Shenzhen-type successes. In the shadows of the runaway successes including the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, South Korea and now the Philippines, two other categories of SEZs exist. They are a large number of marginally positive zones and the vast number of outright failures.

Sri Lanka’s Free Trade Zones are only marginally successful. The tariff and other FTZ benefits are available across the county. Most new manufacturing ventures don’t find an attractive investment environment in the zones.

Colombo Port City’s designers aim for its international financial centre, to attract global businesses to establish their regional offices here due to the ease with which they can operate and transact. To avoid the mediocrity of Sri Lanka’s FTZs, the designers of the Port City face several challenges. For our cover story, we brought together a panel of experts to discuss these.

Echelon Magazine Description:

Intelligent Storytelling

The one thing that will define the Echelon magazine will be the quality of the storytelling. Echelon,published monthly, will cover in depth Sri Lanka’s most successful businesses, examine their winning strategiesand profile their leaders in immersive stories. Great stories are also never limited to words, and our approach includes rich photography, bold graphics and leading edge design which together will make for a compelling read.

But business doesn’t start and end in a boardroom;it extends to the golf club greens, to international travel and to pursuits that blurthe lines between commercial venture and sheer passion. The Echelon team will present the best in business and lifestyle coverage that will appeal to an exclusive and affluent readership: an otherwise hard to reach demographic.

Content will be developed by one of the most experienced and proven teams of editors, financial journalists, photographers and designers in the country.This team has already raised the bar for powerful and expertly crafted business news. Shamindra Kulamannage, will lead the editorial team.

The reputation of Echelon is being built on the separation between editorial and advertising. However we are also looking for the most creative and impactful new formats that can be applied in our magazines, iPad app as well as website to help our clients reach our audience. We are flexible and creative and we will have a solution for every single advertiser who wants to reach our audience.

We are passionate about creative results and about working with our advertisers to help them create bespoke multi platform creative solutions with our in house creative team and of course our sales team.

Echelon will be a great place to show off the products and capabilities of our clients because they will be surrounded by an editorial product that is expertly crafted, full of integrity and intelligence.