The local business fabric
Sint-Niklaas is the capital of the Waasland, and that is above all a story about location. The city sits wedged between the ports of Antwerp and Ghent, where the E17 and the E34 cross — a position logistics has made the most of: warehouses, distribution centres, forwarders and hauliers fill Industriepark-Noord and -Zuid and the sites towards the Waasland port. Alongside them, a real manufacturing base survives, part of it descended from the old textile and clothing trade, together with a strong retail function: the Waasland Shopping Center and Belgium's largest market square draw shoppers from the whole region. What we see in practice with Waasland companies: they are rarely big enough to keep an IT department, yet their processes are already complex — orders, routes, stock, invoicing, customers who impose their own system. That is where digital work pays off most, and where we prefer to be.