In five years, a Croatian company has invested more than 20 million kuna in development, with 20 engineers, chemists and other experts working in Zagreb.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Bernard Ivezic writes on the 20th of November, 2019, the HG Spot group, the first major Croatian IT retailer to start developing its own technology brands, such as smartphones and 3D printers, has launched a new Wiip product all of its own.
This is the first electronic liquid (e-cigarette) cigarette to be developed and manufactured right here in Croatia. The group entered the e-cigarette market a little less than a decade ago, but has so far been producing in China. Saša Lončar, owner and CEO of the HG Spot group, which also includes a daughter company Vape Technology through which Wiip is marketed, says this is the culmination of five years of development, with 20 million kuna in total invested.
“Wiip is originally a Croatian product. The idea, development and production of our premium liquid e-cigarette are all taking place in Croatia, in Zagreb, and in the startup phase hired, the new product has about fifty people who regularly monitor its development and listen to customer needs,” says Lončar .
Twenty engineers, chemists and other professionals worked on the development of this brand new Croatian product. In addition to people and research, the investments went to a manufacturing facility in Zagreb. Wiip is also the biggest step forward from HG Spot.
“We consider our Wiip e-cigarette to be a safe product, since it’s a closed system that doesn’t allow liquids to be mixed or for you to manually change the composition of the inserts, and what makes it different from the competition is there are no by-products in the vapors, there are of course no cigarette butts and odors,” says Saša Lončar. He adds that Wiip is the first device of its kind in Southeast Europe to challenge the tobacco industry in a totally new way.
The world’s most famous e-cigarette maker, the American startup Juul, received an investment of 650 million US dollars last year, raising its market value to an enormous 15 billion US dollars. Juul was founded in mid-2015, so it is less than five years old and co-owned by Altria Group, the owner of the American Philip Morris.
A month ago, CNBC announced that Altria had written off a third of the value of investing in startups because of increasing scrutiny by regulators and suspected illnesses related to e-cigarette use.
Despite this, Juul’s worth still grew last year, and it is now worth as much as 24 billion US dollars. Saša Lončar says his e-cigarette business is growing. For the past five years, he has built an extensive sales network in Croatia, and has also prepared for export, by appearing at the world’s largest tobacco trade fair Inter-Tabac in Dortmund.
“The fact that Wiip is already available from more than 2,000 outlets across Croatia at the outset confirms that it has been well received, and negotiations are underway to go regional and EU markets,” Lončar concluded.
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