As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, Livno-born businessman Mate Rimac is moving his company to a new space due to the excellent levels of growth he has been experiencing with more and more employees, he announced on his Facebook profile.
Earlier on this month, it was announced that Porsche had further increased its investment in Rimac Automobili, increasing its stake in the company to 24 percent. The latest investment strengthens Rimac Automobili´s position as a company specialising in technology development and the production of key systems for the high-performance electric vehicle market.
Since Porsche’s first investment in businessman Mate Rimac´s company back in 2018, the Rimac Automobili team has doubled to nearly 1,000 employees.
Rimac wrote a Facebook status which said that his company has been struggling with space for years and they are currently scattered across ten locations. The long-term solution to this problem is the construction of the Rimac campus, but until it is completed, the company will work from the new space, which is the former Pevec in Jankomir. It is a space which covers 25,000 square metres in total.
¨Given that we´re growing very quickly (both in terms of the number of people and the number of projects and production lines we have), we´ve been struggling with space for years, and as such we´re scattered in 10 locations (14 facilities in 9 cities and 3 countries), which makes things for our business very difficult. I think it is well known that we have been planning to build a campus for a long time now – our long-term solution to the location problem. Unfortunately, some things are going quite slowly, so we still have to “patch” up some things and find some semi-solutions. We recently opened an R&D office for 400+ people in Zagreb. We haven´t yet published any pictures or details about that location – we will soon,¨ businessman Mate Rimac wrote on Facebook.
“As the realisation of the Rimac campus will take some time, we´ve been intensively looking for a space that will enable us to survive until the campus becomes a reality. We were looking for a space of at least 15,000 m2 in Zagreb and its surroundings. I believe that there´s no space that we didn´t visit – we even went so far as to see crazy combinations such as the old passenger terminal of the Airport (Pleso), various shopping centres (Mandi, West Gate, Tekstil Promet…), old industrial buildings (Gredelj, Viadukt, a bunch of neglected old factories) etc. I think we´ve literally looked at everything that can more or less meet the conditions (even areas quite far from Zagreb) and the conclusion is – Croatia really does not have suitable (and available) space for any more such serious production. Some locations may be used but are not suitable for the area in which they´re located or their ownership/property status issues (eg Gredelj) or have already agreed a long-term lease, so it´s impossible to start using a building within a reasonable time (such as the former Magma in Jaska, which would be our best solution).
At least now we know that we have gone through everything we can and made the best decision based on all of the available data. Or in fact – the least bad. “Bad” because we have to invest a lot of money in a space that we will only use for a few years until we move to the campus. But I guess that’s the price of growth (and locations where there are no industrial plants available).
We decided on the former Pevec in Jankomir – an area of some 25,000 square metres. I know, it´s far from perfect, but considering everything, this was really the only possible option.
The works are in full swing and in 4-5 months we should have 400-500 employees on site. Part of the production will be located there, industrialisation, part of the development and other parts of our business. As with all of our locations – despite the short time of use, we will do our best to arrange the location to be representative and comfortable to stay in and work in. I hope tours will be possible by the end of the year.
P.S. We´ll publish the Rimac campus project with all the details in the next few weeks,¨ businessman Mate Rimac wrote on his Facebook page.
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