Facts & Figures
The future has begun
Dortmund welcomes the future - and all who take part in shaping it. You too can profit from this. The City of Dortmund has joined forces with local businesses and the scientific community to launch an ambitious initiative: the dortmund-project. The dortmund-project supports innovative companies in Dortmund and offers ideal conditions for new start-ups. The initiative focuses on the following new anchor industries:
- IT
- e-logistics
- micro technology
At the heart of europe
Dortmund is the ideal base for the European IT market, situated right at the center of Europe between Paris and Berlin, in one of the largest agglomerations on the continent: the Rhine-Ruhr region.
With a population of almost 600,000, Dortmund, after Cologne, is the second largest city in the Rhine-Ruhr region. This prosperous area has a population of 18 million - potential customers for you. Almost 500 million people live within a radius of 500 kilometers - that's 40 per cent of all the citizens of the European Union (EU).
Customers and partners for you - just around the corner
The Rhine-Ruhr region is one of the leading economic regions in the EU: 700,000 companies here could become your customers or partners, including 19 of the hundred largest European companies. Several automobile manufacturers have factories here, and leading German airlines have their headquarters in this area. The region is home to chemicals giants, public utilities and a number of telecommunications companies, among others Thyssen Krupp, Bayer, Henkel, Lufthansa, Ford, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Karstadt/Quelle.
You can reach these companies quickly and conveniently via the dense network of freeways and railroads in the Rhine-Ruhr region. Customers from further afield can also reach you with ease: from Dortmund's modern airport you can fly to German and European centers and beyond. The international airports Cologne/Bonn and Dusseldorf (each only an hour away), as well as Frankfurt (two hours away), also link you with worldwide destinations.
Dortmund lies at the intersection of Germany's busiest East-West freeway with one of the main North-South connections in central Europe. High-speed train services link Dortmund with all major cities in Germany and the neighboring countries. On top of that, Dortmund's port, the largest canal port in Europe, also presents itself as an obvious hub for the movement of goods.
