Big CEE shopping center in Novi Sad opens September 2012

Last week Israel's Big Cee resumed the work on the construction of a shopping center at 11 Sentadrejski Road, in the vicinity of the Novi Sad Dairy.

Big Cee's representative Branimir Bojic told Dnevnik daily that the shopping center should be opened in September, adding that the work was going on schedule. This shopping center is the second foreign investment during the term of the current city authorities, the first one being the facility within former Koteks Produkt, which is now owned by a Spanish company and operates as Koteks Viscofan.

Concrete structure of the future shopping center is already finished, and now the facility needs to be covered. This complex on a 9-hectare lot will comprise a parking lot for 1,500 cars, a 4,000-square-meter supermarket, discount stores and over 50 outlets offering the world's leading brands, footwear, clothing, lingerie, jewelery, furniture, do-it-yourself products...

The work started in the first week of June 2011, when it was said that the facility worth about EUR 70 million would be completed in 12 months. Bojic told Dnevnik that that was the initial, but then the deadline was extended an additional three months.

- The crisis affects everybody, including us, but there have been no significant changes in Big Cee's plans for Serbia. We are still interested in building several shopping centers here, and Novi Sad is a strategic starting position for our operations in Serbia - said Bojic.

Big Cee company operates 11 shopping centers in Israel, spanning a total of 160,000 square meters, and it ranks first in the construction of open-air shopping centers in that country. It has recently entered the market of India and now plans to expand to the USA as well.

Big Cee arrived in Novi Sad in October 2009, when they bought a building land and announced that the construction of their first shopping center in Serbia would commence in December 2009 and be finished in December 2010. They later blamed delays on the economic crisis and the sluggishness of the local administration in the issuance of building permits.