The Science and Technology Park in Plzeň will open in September

Plzeň - The Science and Technology Park Plzeň (VTP), which two days ago won the CzechInvest award for Business Project of the Year, will open to research and development companies in September. In four buildings costing a quarter of a billion crowns, right next to the busy 120-hectare industrial zone Borská pole, there will be 4,200 square meters of rental space, more than half of which is reserved for Czech companies in the fields of information technology, applied software for electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and the automotive industry. Up to 400 high school and university students will find jobs there. "We have prepared the second phase, which is one-fifth smaller than the first," said Emil Chochole, head of VTP, whose 95 percent of shares are held by the city and the rest by the region.
    "These will be top companies with high added value. The city does not support assembly plants with temporary foreign workers," said Deputy Mayor and Chair of the Supervisory Board of VTP Vladimír Duchek. The companies will be linked with businesses and the University of West Bohemia (ZČU). At Borská pole, developed since 1993, there are 11,000 workers, at least a third from Slovakia, Poland, and Ukraine. Borská pole has supported private entrepreneurship. The development of the industrial zone is no longer the city's responsibility but that of private individuals.
    According to Chochole, the park should serve primarily as a commercial support for ZČU and its research. The university's leadership will soon sign a five-year lease agreement, under which ZČU will rent a third of the VTP area for the established Center for New Technologies, which will be a special institute funded by grants and industry. "This five-year contract provides stability for VTP," said Duchek. This way, ZČU will avoid investments in buildings.
    It is precisely the research commercial teams, which will include experts from ZČU, that will become the backbone of VTP. The second type of companies that will rent laboratories and offices will be researchers for regional businesses. The third option, which Chochole does not prefer, is the arrival of a well-known foreign company.
    VTP has 112 million crowns in its own funds, which it acquired through share issuance. It also owns three hectares of land worth 20 million crowns. The city council approved that the building, supported by the EU with 150 million crowns, can take out a loan of 100 million crowns. Geosan will hand it over by the end of July.