What Investors Actually Want: The Gap Between Pitch Decks and Due Diligence

Investment promotion agencies spend ninety percent of their pitch decks talking about tax holidays, cheap land, and 'strategic geographic locations'. Corporate site-selection engineers spend ninety percent of their due diligence measuring voltage harmonics, 90th-percentile customs tail risk, and technician attrition.

By Yaschin Mohabir · 6 November 2026 · 14 min read

I have sat on both sides of the site-selection table: advising governments trying to attract anchor factories, and sitting inside multinational corporate real-estate and manufacturing engineering teams scoring shortlists of special economic zones. The disconnect between the two rooms is almost comedic. The government's Investment Promotion Agency (IPA) walks in with a forty-slide keynote full of drone videos, a map with concentric circles showing that the country sits 'at the crossroads of three continents', and a bold promise of a twenty-year corporate tax holiday. The corporate site-selection director nods politely, waits for the presentation to end, and opens a 180-line Excel engineering matrix. He asks three questions: 'What was the 95th-percentile container dwell time at your port gate during peak season last October? What is the total harmonic distortion and millisecond voltage-sag frequency on your 33kV zone feeder? And how many CNC multi-axis maintenance technicians graduated within thirty kilometres of this site last year?' When the IPA delegation cannot answer a single one of those three questions with audited numbers, the zone is crossed off the shortlist on the flight home.

Why your 'Strategic Geographic Location' slide makes site selectors roll their eyes

Every country on earth is at the centre of the map if you centre the map on your country. Yet almost every SEZ pitch deck opens with ten slides explaining that the host nation is 'a strategic gateway to 1.4 billion consumers', followed by macroeconomic GDP growth projections and a list of corporate income tax exemptions. Understand who is actually sitting across the table during a site-selection review. The person deciding where to put a $250 million medical-device, semiconductor-packaging, or EV-component plant is not a macroeconomic tourist. He or she is a Vice President of Global Manufacturing Operations or a senior partner at a global location-advisory firm whose career is on the line if the new plant misses its startup date by six months or suffers a 4% quality scrap rate. That executive already knows where your country is on a map, and his tax department already knows that OECD Pillar Two caps the value of your zero-percent tax holiday. What keeps him awake at night are physical and institutional failure modes that cannot be hedged once $250 million of machinery is bolted to the floor. If the local power grid drops voltage for 150 milliseconds twice a month, his cleanroom ...

The three ruthless filters of a real corporate site-selection funnel

Here is how a multinational corporation and its location advisors actually narrow a list of twenty candidate zones down to one winner over a six-month process. Filter 1 (Months 1–2) is the Desktop Engineering & Knockout Screen. The investor never calls the twenty zones on the longlist. Instead, analysts screen public data, satellite imagery, and proprietary databases for hard 'knockout criteria': Is there a contiguous 15-hectare flood-free plot with bearing capacity >150 kPa? Is there at least 20 MW of spare N-1 redundant substation capacity at the plot boundary today (not 'planned for 2029')? Can the tenant sign a 15-year renewable PPA at <$0.08/kWh? Does the port have direct weekly mainline container calls to Rotterdam or Los Angeles without double transshipment? Sixteen of the twenty zones fail right here—often because their website is a marketing brochure with no technical specifications. Filter 2 (Months 3–4) is the Variance & Tail-Risk Stress Test on the four shortlisted zones. Here the engineering team ignores means and demands distributions. They do not ask 'What is your target customs clearance time?' They ask for the raw timestamp log of the last 5,000 import declaratio...

How deal conversion when an SEZ switches from marketing brochures to engineering telemetry

Between 2020 and 2025, we tracked 18 emerging-market zones that overhauled their investment promotion model: replacing generic roadshow pitches with an open-access Engineering Data Room, pre-certified 'Shovel-Ready' plots (with geotechnical boreholes, Master EIAs, and 33kV feeder bays already built to the plot boundary), and transparent tenant reference panels. Consider how the discipline of investment promotion has evolved over four decades. In the 1980s, IPAs ran print advertisements in airline magazines. In the 2000s, they attended trade fairs and handed out USB sticks with tax laws. In the 2010s, they hired PR firms to produce drone videos. In 2026, site selection is an algorithmic data-science and engineering discipline. Assessing operational & infrastructure readiness (real shovel-ready plots, reliable power, fast customs) together with telemetry transparency & aftercare quality separates durable industrial engines from short-lived enclaves. Stranded legacy zones ('Brochure Potemkins') spend millions on roadshows to market unserviced desert. Single-lever zones ('Silent Gems') have decent infrastructure but lose desktop screens because they publish no technical data in Engl...

Why aftercare for existing tenants is the highest-ROI marketing budget on earth

Ask a typical SEZ authority how it splits its commercial budget between hunting for new logos (international roadshows, conferences, PR agencies) and serving existing tenants (aftercare, resolving utility bottlenecks, expanding training academies). In four out of five zones, 85% of the budget goes to hunting new logos and 15% goes to aftercare. That allocation is completely upside-down. Globally, 60% to 70% of all new capital expenditure inside mature economic zones comes from reinvestment and Phase-2/Phase-3 expansions by existing tenants—and the remaining 30% of new greenfield deals are won or lost during the unchaperoned reference call with existing tenants. Fixing a voltage-sag or customs bottleneck for the twenty factories already inside your fence is the single most powerful marketing campaign you can run. Publishing an open-access digital engineering data room also transforms inbound lead quality: global site-selection consultants (Deloitte, EY, Cushman & Wakefield, Hickey, Conway) automatically include transparent, telemetry-verified zones on confidential client shortlists before the government even knows a mandate is active.8,9

The counterparty fallout when a zone confuses PR with due diligence

Marketing directors, civil engineers, zone chief executives, and corporate site selectors waste years and millions of dollars whenever promotional decks diverge from on-the-ground engineering reality. Trace the cash-flow consequences across the four seats at the table. The IPA / Zone Marketing Director and Zone Infrastructure Engineer can defer maintenance, delay regulatory updates, or tolerate slow customs clearance without triggering an immediate crisis in their own annual appropriations. For the Zone Authority CEO and Corporate Site-Selection Lead, those exact same delays translate immediately into missed export windows, penalty clauses, and impaired debt service. Fire the PR agency that wants $2 million to put your zone's logo on airport luggage carts. Spend that $2 million pre-certifying geotechnical boreholes, publishing live grid and customs telemetry, and solving every single operational complaint of your current tenants.

Hardwiring the charter to audit your zone's Investor Data Room today

Open your zone's website and investor pack right now, and score it honestly against the five tests that a global site-selection consultant runs on Monday morning. The worked calculation below traces how a corporate site-selection committee scores two finalist zones competing for a $200 million precision electronics factory—showing why the 'Higher-Tax, High-Certainty' zone crushes the 'Zero-Tax Brochure' zone. $200M Electronics Plant Site-Selection Scorecard: 'Zero-Tax Brochure Zone' vs. 'Shovel-Ready Telemetry Zone' Reconstructed from actual weighted corporate site-selection matrices for electronics and medical-device plants (2021–2025). The spread captured in the worked model reflects a fundamental shift in global site selection: multinational boards now value execution certainty and compliance immunity far above nominal rent or tax discounts. The zone offering 0% tax scored 9 out of 9 on tax—and lost the $200 million factory by 53 points because it could not prove its voltage stability, its 95th-percentile customs speed, or its technician pipeline.

Throw away the brochure; publish the telemetry

Serious industrial investors are allergic to adjectives. Whenever a zone pitch deck uses words like world-class, seamless, strategic, or business-friendly without a distribution curve or an engineering specification attached, the investor assumes you are hiding a bottleneck. Stop marketing your zone like a vacation resort. Pre-clear your plots with geotechnical boreholes and Master EIAs. Bring the 33kV feeder and the fibre ring to the plot boundary before you pitch. Publish your live substation SAIDI logs, your 95th-percentile gate-to-dock customs timestamps, and your audited technician wage tables online for every site selector on earth to inspect. And treat your current tenants so well that they close your next ten deals for you. Corporate site selectors do not buy adjectives or drone videos. They buy 99.998% voltage stability, 95th-percentile customs certainty, and an unchaperoned conversation with a happy plant manager next door. Disclosure The case above stands on its own evidence; nothing in it depends on what follows. For transparency: this paper grew out of the same work that built SEZ Explorer, the most comprehensive special economic zone database there is, 8,296-plus ...