As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes, the European aviation consortium Airbus, Germany’s BMW, the Japanese Mitsubishi and the French railways (SNCF) are just some of the big names and regular customers of the Zagreb company Bajkmont, which has just completed a European co-financed project to build its new factory in Rugvica.
As Miroslav Bajkovec, Deputy Director of the Zagreb company Bajmont pointed out, this family company has strategically focused its business on several sectors and on exports in order to maintain stability and business continuity.
“Such a business organisation enables stability and business continuity, because when one industry comes to a standstill, another one grows. For example, last year there was a decline in demand in the automotive and aerospace industries, but there was growth for railways, energy and environmental protection, and especially the IT industry for which the company is doing more and more work.
The company is no longer small, but it isn’t too big either, so we’re flexible and we can quickly adapt to the requirements demanded by our customers and the market conditions,” said Bajkovec.
Although the construction sector is one of the Zagreb company Bajkmont’s main customers, they’re also focused as suppliers across several other industries: environmental protection, energy, petrochemicals, aerospace and automotive, railways, IT industry and logistics.
Although they’ve long been mainly focused on the Croatian market, over the last five years or so, a serious step has been made to foreign markets where, as they pointed out, Bajkmont has positioned itself as a renowned manufacturer of quality products with customers who have significantly larger orders than the company can currently accept. Their main export market is the European Union (EU), and individually they mostly export to France, Germany, Sweden, Austria and Italy.
“Over the last couple of years, we’ve been exporting to the USA, for example, attractive steel structures for museums in Washington and Los Angeles, and projects in Canada, Central America such as El Salvador, steel structures for geothermal power plants, and a fusion reactor in France – ITER, then to Qatar, Canada and Japan,” explained Miroslav Bajkovec.
This impressive Croatian company has also delivered structures to a number of environmental and waste treatment plant projects for Japan’s huge companies Hitachi and Mitsubishi, and closer to home in Europe over in the United Kingdom, they worked on a major Buckinghamshire waste incinerator project.
The company also worked on waste management in France, for their regular customers in the segment of the production of technological equipment for waste sorting plants and structures for petrochemical plants.
“We’re currently completing steel structures for the plants of another new waste sorting plant in Paris, and this is our second sorting plant in Paris out of a total of 11 in France. I would also mention the new Nestle Purina plant in the United States, the geothermal power plant in El Salvador, the stone processing plant in Sweden…
Here on the Croatian market, we’re completing works on the production and assembly of the structure for the Pampas stadium in Osijek, and last year we performed the construction for the new terminal in the Port of Ploce,” noted the deputy director of the Zagreb company Bajkmont.
Today, along with the founder’s father, the company is run by his sons Miroslav and Ivan. Of the two employees, the company has grown to today’s 150. Back in pre-pandemic 2019, they generated 70 million kuna in revenue, of which 65 percent was generated from abroad, and such a trend was maintained in the past year.
In order to remain competitive on the ever-demanding market, the company decided to invest in a new plant that should soon, in stages, start production. As Bajkovec himself explained, this is a project with a total value of 75 million kuna, of which they managed to withdraw 14.7 million kuna in grants from the European Regional Development Fund.
It regards a plant which will cover 15,000 square metres that will enable them to strengthen their overall production capacities, ensure better production technological capabilities and even more pronounced competitiveness on the global market.
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