Erwin Kaufmann is in a tight spot.
The company he leads has just announced a $1.9bn (£1.18bn) investment in Uruguay, said to be the largest yet in this small South American country of 3.4 million people.
Now he needs to find the thousands of workers to build a pulp mill for him.
And that, he has discovered, is not an easy task in this booming economy.
Mr Kaufmann is the chief executive of Montes del Plata, a joint venture between Swedish/Finnish Stora Enso, one of the world’s largest forest product companies, and its Chilean partner Arauco.
He says the company is facing two major challenges.
“Firstly, the country is enjoying a fairly good economic situation, and there is full employment in some sectors, like construction,” he says.
Five years ago, some 25,000 workers were employed in construction, he says. Now, there are 50,000. There simply are not enough of them to meet the needs of the industry.
The second challenge, Mr Kaufmann continues, is that, “we need workers with specific skills, like welders of some special pieces, and those are difficult to find even in larger countries”.
Foreign workers
The Montes del Plata pulp mill, to be situated in Colonia, across the river from Buenos Aires, Argentina, will have an annual capacity of 1.3 million tonnes. This makes it the largest in the world by output.
Construction will start next May and will require between 3,200 and 6,000 workers. The mill is expected to be operational in 2013.
To achieve this, some of the workers must come from abroad, Mr Kaufmann says.
“We will try to recruit every local worker available, we will train people jointly with the government,” he says.
“But if that is not enough, we will need to bring people in from other countries.”
The negative side of growth
Uruguay is a country that until recently used to be burdened by widespread unemployment.
As recently as in 2002, one in five were unemployed here, according to official statistics.
Continued at BBC Latin America HERE:
