Who is already in the corridor.

The American footprint in Serbia is already substantial. Molson Coors owns the country's largest brewery, ADM owns its largest soy processor, Philip Morris in Niš is a top-15 exporter, Lear, Adient, Aptiv, Cooper Standard and Goodyear run automotive plants, Ball makes cans, Van Drunen Farms has freeze-dried Serbian fruit for export since 2002, and Rivian, Microsoft, NCR, EPAM, TeleSign, Epic Games and Take-Two own Serbian engineering. Coca-Cola HBC owns Rosa, Bambi and Fresh&Co. The gold lines are that existing corridor, most of it built one decision at a time.

Below the multinationals sits the tier that makes the corridor grow: Serbian engineering firms with audited revenues between five and fifty million euros, food producers already exporting to America, and domestic automotive suppliers with European customers. On the American side, the counterparts are the specialty chemical, pharmaceutical, software and import businesses of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.

Eleven of the American parents already operating in Serbia are headquartered in the Mid-Atlantic corridor itself: West Pharmaceutical, Ametek, Viatris, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, RCM Technologies, Louis Berger, Marriott, Hilton, Mars and DXC. They carry a gold ring on the map. Between all of them stand the institutions: the Serbian chamber and its 2023 memorandum with Ohio, the Development Agency of Serbia, World Trade Center Delaware, the U.S. Commercial Service and the universities. Dashed lines mark regional and institutional relationships.

The gap with neighboring markets is measurable. AmCham Romania counts more than a thousand American enterprises and about 120,000 jobs in Romania; the Serbian chamber counts about 30,000 American-linked jobs in Serbia.