“You’d be crazy to open in Portugal” CEO of US company Cloudflare warns tech companies
The CEO of US cloud computing company Cloudflare has lashed out against Portugal’s “unresolved bureaucratic problems” and has threatened to pull the plug on investment.
The CEO of Cloudflare, which had announced 500 jobs, Matthew Prince, posted on X that “Portugal is not a serious country” and that the “conditions for investment have worsened” over the past six years since Cloudflare opened in Portugal.
And blasted: “All of the promises that the government made to cut bureaucracy, making it easier to operate as a business and hire, have been broken”.
Cloudflare is a company that provides a wide range of services focused on improving the security, performance, and reliability of websites and applications. It’s a cloud service that acts as a network, protecting against threats and accelerating content delivery by routing traffic through its global network.
“Honestly: across the board, Portugal has gotten significantly WORSE since we started making investments in the country. If the trend continues, we’ll stop investing. And if you’re considering it as a tech firm, you’d be crazy to without some hard reassurances from the government.”
“They promised a lot to hire a lot of people in Portugal. We hired a lot of people and the Portuguese government did not meet any of its promises”, said the CEO classifying the process as a “clown show”.
He said that the conditions to invest had got worse in several aspects, particularly on immigration, as well as visas, adding that red tape in Portugal was “suffocating”.
“I’m tired of them telling me that things are going to get better if we invest more, but things tend to continually get worse,” he said.
Matthew Prince said that Colombia, Chile and even Argentina were all more serious than Portugal, adding that “Portugal promises a lot but delivers a lot less.”
According to the online news source ECO, Cloudflare moved to new offices in Lisbon in October last year and announced its intention to hire between 400-500 people over the next four years.
The idea is that the hub it has created in Portugal will eventually employ 800 people on the same scale as it has at its company in Austin, Texas.
Prince also complained about the long queues at the airport back in 2018. “I landed in Lisbon to look at the possibility of opening an office here. The two hours it took me to get through immigration did not give me a good first impression”, he said posting a photo of a long queue at Humberto Delgado airport in Lisbon.
In 2021, another episode involving Cloudflare put a fly in the ointment for US-Portugal relations, at that time over its removal from being involved in the Census 2021after objections from the National Data Protection Commission (CNPD), causing a diplomatic embarrassment.
The discomfort was voiced at the Transatlantic Economic & Trade Summit organised by the American Chamber of Commerce in Portugal (AmCham).
“We are worried with the recent decision from the Portuguese data protection agency involving Cloudflare”, said Kirstin Kane, Deputy Chief of Mission and Chargé d’Affaires, ad interim, at the US Embassy in Lisbon (2019-2022), at the time.
“The consequences threaten to not only upset trade between the US and Portugal, but also have other significant implications and affect digital transition in Portugal”, she had said.
CNPD had given Portugal’s National Statistics Institute (INE) 12 hours to suspend sending personal data from the Census 2021 to the US or other third-party countries without an adequate level of protection, either through Cloudflare Inc or another company.
The following day, Cloudflare said that there had never been a Census data transfer to the US and that the statements from the CNPD did not “exactly reflect the service provided.”
