As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes, over the next 20 years, 40,000 new aircraft will be produced worldwide, and in each of them there will be parts from the new factory of the Austrian-Chinese aerospace industry Fischer Advanced Composite Components (FACC), which opened on Friday in Jakovlje near Zagreb.
As Robert Machtlinger, Director of the FACC Group, explained, this is an investment of 15 million euros that will significantly increase the importance of the FACC on the global market.
Representatives of 42 nations
“When we started 30 years ago as a small company in Austria with 35 enthusiasts who started developing composite materials, we dreamed of becoming what we are now – a corporation with 3,000 people in 13 countries and last year’s revenue of half a billion euros.
We currently have 170 aeronautical experts in the FACC Jakovlje plant factory in Croatia, by the end of the year there will be 250 of them, and in the next three years, there will be more than 700. With this latest opening, we now have a total of 15 factories across the world where people from 42 nations work, which shows how much of a multicultural environment we cultivate, and we’re one that operates globally,” Machtlinger said.
He added that their customers are from all over the world, and most companies come from the EU, China, India, the USA and Canada. Before the coronavirus crisis, which hit the entire aviation industry sector extremely hard, the company reached 750 million euros in revenue, and Machtlinger announces that they don’t intend to stop with this factory in Jakovlje, but continue to look at expanding their business and operations.
Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, who attended the ceremonial opening and launch of the FACC Jakovlje plant, pointed out that this is an example of what every investment in Croatia should look like.
“The first contacts with FACC were established back in 2017, and shortly thereafter, many institutions, public and private on all sides, made a number of decisions. We’re now witnessing the successful finalisation of this 15m-euro project and the creation of 700 new jobs,” Plenkovic said.
He added that, in a conversation with FACC’s leaders, he learned that they considered the location for this new factory in places in about 10 countries in Central and Eastern Europe, mostly EU member states, but Ukraine and Serbia were also in the game.
“Their assessment that Croatia was the best candidate, both for security, connectivity, EU integration and a reliable and secure way forward, has now proved prophetic because we are on the threshold of the Eurozone and of Schengen,” stated Prime Minister Plenkovic.
Great potential
The new Jakovlje FACC plant, as they pointed out from the company itself, was designed in close cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute. The goal, they say, was to build the factory according to the most modern aspects of industrial production.
The possibility of a modular upgrade of this new FACC Jakovlje plant, integrated into the existing structure, was a fundamental prerequisite in its interior design. During the official opening of the factory on Friday, the next step in its expansion was announced. In the second and third phases, the area of the factory will triple, and this project will start immediately.
The FACC pointed out that the space for the development of the aerospace industry is huge and has so far been used only partially. This is supported by the fact that currently there are almost eight billion people in the world, and by 2050 the global population will increase to 10 billion.
According to current estimates, as many as 80 percent of the world’s population has never flown, so it’s clear that this will change in the coming period and there will be high demand for aviation technology, especially in Southeast Asia where air passenger growth is already most pronounced.
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