Geneva Global Trading Hub

The Lemanic Region's success is partly due to historical events, partly due to cumulative layers of competence.

During the First World War, neutral Switzerland offered a vision of “business as usual”, still fresh in the 1920s when the first grain trading houses established themselves in the area, ostensibly to be closer to their major client, Nestlé. A number of ex-Ottoman Turkish traders also came at that time - the city of Lausanne being a convenient stop on the London-Istanbul Oriental Express. In the 1920s and ‘30s, the creation of the League of Nations and such organisations as the International Labour Organisation heightened Geneva’s “neutral” and “international” profile.

In the forties, Geneva was positioned to become the ideal location for business in Europe: the Swiss franc being, with the US dollar, one of the two currencies freely exchanged and the Geneva’s telephone system, excellent for the time, was essential for international trading.

Subsidiaries of US companies concentrated here throughout the 1940s and ‘50s. During the Cold War period, Geneva offered a neutral place to establish relationships and accelerate administrative procedures for trade in the Eastern Bloc.

Meanwhile, the growing strategic importance of the Middle East would also play a role. Geneva had long been a favourite vacation spot for wealthy Arabs. In the 1960s, Egyptian cotton merchants looking to move their operations out of Nasser’s Egypt came to Geneva. With the first oil crisis (1973-1974), a number of oil traders joined them. In the 1990s, it was the turn of the Russian oil companies to set up offices in the area.