Milan and Vinko Matijević welcomed us at the Plamen factory in Požega and showed us the latest equipment worth 40 million kuna lying uselessly in the factory yard covered with nylon bags.
The co-owners of Plamen, CEO Milan and board member Vinko Matijević, run one of the largest foundries in this part of Europe. After surviving two bankruptcies and changing ownership structure, Plamen has recorded steady growth in revenue and profit in recent years. Due to a large number of orders, the factory operates in three shifts, every Saturday is a working day, but demand still exceeds capacity. The Matijević brothers planned to invest 120 million kuna in new equipment and facilities, but state bureaucracy has not issued the necessary permits for more than a year, which is why the valuable equipment is sitting in the factory yard and production cannot be expanded, which would create about a hundred new jobs. Vinko Matijević explained the problems they are facing in an interview in the latest issue of Lider.
What is the problem with your investments?
– We are making strong progress in capturing the market and today we work in three shifts and every Saturday. If we could work on Sundays, we would, but we have to maintain the machines. At the end of 2011, we assessed that we need to expand the facility. The goal is to increase capacity by 30 to 40 percent in primary processing. We embarked on the project after receiving two million kuna in non-repayable funds from the previous government. We took advantage of the change of government and the promise that they would urgently resolve the paperwork for projects worth more than twenty million kuna, and ours is worth more than a hundred. In the first two months of last year, we gathered all the paperwork to transfer the current medium voltage supply to the 110-kilovolt network, in order to avoid local distributors and ‘reduce’ the current electricity price by 500 thousand euros per year. Concurrently, another investment is being realized.
To clarify the first investment for laypeople, you actually want to connect directly to the power lines to avoid local distributors?
– That’s right, you are correct. We passed all the technical studies in the project with HEP, the Institute for Electrical Engineering, and HERA. After there were no technical obstacles in that part, on March 7 of last year, we went to the Ministry of Construction with a letter to Mr. Vrdoljak. After that, we started preparing all the necessary projects, and then on May 22, we submitted the request for a location permit. At that time, we gathered everything the state requires, such as opinions from water management, from conservators, and many other approvals. After we submitted all the papers, we waited for the location permit. We had our first conference on September 21, and there were no objections, but only on November 9 did we finally receive the location permit. We lost six months on that. Why, I do not know. Then we could start gathering other papers needed for the building permit. We managed to complete that in a month and a half, and then on December 18, we submitted the request for the building permit, which we still have not received. When we realized that we could achieve this investment, we ordered the devices that take the longest to wait for. Namely, their production takes a year, but we managed to shorten it to ten months. In February of last year, we arranged for the transformers that arrived in December and that we needed to install in the substations so that we could connect to the power lines. At that time, we also ordered the electrical equipment for the electro-smelting furnace, which is the second part of the investment that also has production deadlines; it arrived in March of this year. We spent 40 million kuna, paid for it, and now the equipment is lying under nylon in the yard. For the second investment, we submitted the request for a location permit on December 21 of last year, and only on May 2 did we have a meeting at the Ministry. No one had objections, but again there is no location permit. Every month we lose 400 thousand kuna on electricity, every delay postpones other projects for us. In addition, we would employ one hundred workers after we set up the new equipment.
