Moldova is selling itself to foreign investors as a skilled, EU-aligned base beside Ukraine rather than a source of cheap labour, Invest Moldova director Natalia Bejan told IntelliNews on the sidelines of the Moldovan Business week in Chisinau on October 1.

Bejan was upbeat as the small republic has been making stead progress in recent years with a EU-orientated government and reform drive that has put it as a front-runner to join the EU in the next accession round.

The downside is the small population that limits its options. She said the country would struggle to staff factories that need 5,000 workers so it is focused more on value-added sectors with strong export potential. That, she said, "doesn't sound actually like an issue" to her as the economy is recalibrating towards companies that need fewer hands and more specialists able to take on more complex work.

Foreign direct investment (FDI), the test of whether the pitch works and has doubled over the last five years. However, more recently the flows have become more volatile thanks to the fraught state of European business, disrupted by multiple shocks from the Ukraine war and the Middle East energy shocks.

FDI came to about €409mn in 2025, down from €424mn a year earlier, according to the government, and inflows nearly halved y/y in 1Q26. Moldova is running a current account deficit of nearly 20% of GDP. Long dubbed “Europe’s poorest country,”  Ukraine has overtaken it to take that dubious title, but EU accession talks are moving and a $588bn Ukrainian rebuild is waiting next door in Ukraine should the war end which represents a huge opportunity for Moldova’s business. Bejan says that the work has already begun as Ukrainian businesses start to relocate some of their production and logistics to Moldovan territory and investments are already been made into the construction materials sector as much for the country’s own needs as any demand from Ukraine.

Bejan concedes Moldova is still statistically near the bottom of Europe's income tables, but says a skilled, educated person can now live well there. Her agency's job is to match that pitch to each investor: kindergartens for one, warehouses for another, IT teams for a third and manufacturing to underpin the growth.

Tourists first

Tourism is growing fastest: international arrivals rose 25% y/y in 1H26, according to UN Tourism's World Tourism Barometer, level with Uzbekistan for the fastest growth in its Europe region and well ahead of Greece and Ireland at 15% and Europe as a whole at 3%.

Chisinau airport handled a record 6.08mn passengers in 2025, up from 4.1mn in 2024, according to the airport, and is expanding its terminal ahead of a new one due in 2027. Bejan said the country needs more hotels, including at the top end, and counts that as investment infrastructure in its own right.

Medical services, from dentistry and IVF to cardiology, have grown on private initiative with little push from the state. "It's growing insanely," Bejan said. Some visitors who come for the wine days at the weekend book themselves in for a dental clean-up before flying home, she said. Moldova already draws more than 36,000 foreign patients a year.

Education exports are growing too. Foreign students from Israel, India, Pakistan and the US, including North Carolina, pay fees in foreign currency to study at Moldovan medical and technical universities. Services exports are one of the three pillars of this year's Business Week, alongside economic integration with the EU and ready-made investment profiles for specific projects, and Bejan said Moldova is close to exporting more services than goods.

One tax for coders

IT is also right at the top of the list, and Moldova already has a well-established and respected IT sector. Companies resident in Moldova IT Park pay a single 7% tax on revenue that replaces all other taxes - payroll, social and medical insurance contributions. Bejan said the number of firms has grown more than tenfold in eight years. The park had 2,725 residents at the end of 2025 and their turnover passed $1bn, roughly ten times the 2018 level, the state news agency Moldpres reported. A separate innovation fund for startups backed by the EU and France, to give startups access to seed capital and early stage investment to broaden the base of new projects coming online and helping them prepare for later rounds of investment.

For IT companies, she offers a cost comparison, setting Moldovan salaries and taxes against German ones for the same team. "I will show you that for sure you will be saving at least 30% of your costs," she said.

Average pay in the park was MDL50,000 (€2,484) a month in 2025. Bejan also pointed to cyber security as a growing field: Moldova launched a national cyber security agency and the Cybercor innovation institute in 2024, and officials say the country faced almost 1bn cyber attacks in 2025.

Six industries and a car part

For manufacturing, the government is offering a state aid scheme for six industries: electronics, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, automotive components, textiles, construction materials and food. Projects worth more than MDL10mn (€497,000) can have up to 60% of the outlay covered through a mix of grants and income tax exemptions, rising to 75% for small companies.

Construction materials serve two markets, Moldova's own and Ukraine's reconstruction. EU pre-accession money is already arriving for roads, bridges and energy-efficient housing, including a €344mn EBRD loan for national roads, and Bejan said Moldova is already short of building capacity.

Car parts are already a large industry. Plants making seat covers and cable harnesses employ thousands and send minibuses up to 100 km to collect workers. By the agency's own calculation, a little over 1% of the world's cars carry at least one Moldovan-made component. Germany takes most of the output, with the Czech Republic a distant second.

The sector has lost some large contracts over the past two years as German carmakers closed production lines, Bejan said, but it has won others. One is a Chinese-backed plant now under construction to make components for electric-vehicle charging equipment, a €20mn project signed at last year's Business Week.

Energy is another priority, with the aim of turning Moldova from an importer into an exporter of green power, including to Ukraine. The government has run two renewables tenders, such as a 170 MW wind auction, offering 15-year fixed-price contracts. Renewables covered 24.5% of gross final electricity consumption in 2025, according to the National Centre for Sustainable Energy.

The Ukrainians are coming

The newest investors are from across the border. Since July, Bejan said, Ukrainian companies whose warehouses were hit by Russian missiles have been opening storage and production sites in Moldova, and a large Ukrainian IT company that moved to Dubai at the start of the full-scale invasion has relocated to Chisinau to be closer to home.

Some use Moldova to process European raw materials for sale in Ukraine; others export from it to southern Europe. Ukraine's largest poultry producer MHP (LSE: MHPC) presented a plan at the Business Week opening to invest €20mn in processing in Moldova, Bejan said.

The influx has used up the available storage, she said.

"We need warehouses right now. Everything is being occupied," Bejan said.

The World Bank's latest needs assessment puts Ukraine's recovery bill at $588bn over ten years. Investors have been cautious about committing to Moldova as a base for the rebuild, but Bejan said several large projects by Ukrainian and international companies will be announced step by step.

Anchored to the EU

The EU is already Moldova's economic centre of gravity. It took 67.5% of Moldova's goods exports in 2025, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, and Bejan said 85% of FDI inflows come from the bloc. Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and Cyprus are the biggest investors, she said.

Brussels opened the first and sixth negotiating clusters with Moldova in June and July, and an EU Growth Plan worth €1.9bn is funding reforms and infrastructure. Bejan said the economic integration is running ahead of the political decision. More than 80% of public services for businesses are now online, and her agency tracks the figure at 82%, so that a foreign owner can register and run a Moldovan company from anywhere.

Drones and Transnistria

The instability in the region was highlight as the day after the Moldovan Business week started a Russian drone crashed and exploded near Hirbovat in Anenii Noi district inside Moldovan territory on September 30. Prime Minister Vasile Tofan said more drones crossed the country in August than in all of 2025 as a Russian hybrid war, testing the EU air defences and attacking defence sector assets gathers pace.

Bejan said the war affects people's mood and sense of safety, but Moldova itself has had no casualties. On Transnistria, where Russia keeps a garrison usually put at about 1,500, she said most of the soldiers were born in the region rather than in Russia, echoing Foreign Minister Mihai Popsoi's statement that only a few hundred Russian troops remain. Bejan visits the breakaway region at least once a month and said shops that would have been insulted by an offer of Moldovan lei a year ago now advertise that they accept them.

A year ago Bejan was selling Moldova's moment of optimism around EU accession and nearshoring. Tofan told delegates on September 28 that the country would win on speed, agility and trust rather than market size. Bejan's version is more concrete: tourists, coders, car parts and Ukrainian warehouses. The FDI numbers have yet to follow.