The local business fabric
East Flanders runs on two engines that have little to do with each other. To the north-east lies the Waasland: the Waasland port area, the logistics zone around Sint-Niklaas and the E17 corridor form one of the densest warehousing and distribution belts in the country, full of hauliers, warehousing operators and packaging firms. Ghent is something else entirely: the university, VIB and the biotech campus in Zwijnaarde have built a cluster of life sciences, plant biotechnology and medtech, flanked by the North Sea Port with steel, chemicals and car assembly. Further south, the Dender area around Aalst and Dendermonde remains a classic SME fabric of food, construction and retail. A biotech scale-up and a haulier from Beveren look unrelated, yet they ask us the same question: how do I get my internal processes out of email attachments.