Poreč Agenor Automation Turns to Building Automation to Retain Engineers

Tourism-dominated Poreč, where aside from the food producer Agrolaguna there has almost never been any significant industrial production, is difficult for anyone not well-informed to associate with the concept of industrial automation. If the business based on research, innovation, and development had not been recognized by the Pula County Chamber of Commerce and awarded the Poreč entrepreneurs with the Golden Kuna for the best small company in Istria in 2018, it would not be easy to assume that in this picturesque tourist town on the western coast of Istria, a company specializing in industrial process automation operates successfully.

Headquartered in Poreč and with two subsequently opened offices in larger centers, in Zagreb and Rijeka, Agenor Automation is growing, a company co-founded two decades ago by four entrepreneurs: Valter Beaković, Andrej Prpić, Robert Štedul, and Branko Labinac. In recent years, it has been growing: it concluded the 2020 business year with over 13 million in revenue and 2.8 million kuna in profit.

– With a lot of effort, time invested, and struggles, the four of us have come to have a company that stands firmly on its feet, recognized by respectable clients and respected by institutions. We started with the four of us, from four employees, and have grown to thirty, with constant natural growth. We have some clients almost from day one; in our business, it is generally always about long-term cooperation with relatively few clients. We primarily deal with industrial automation. To put it simply, we automate production lines and put them into operation. We work a lot in the tobacco, steel, and automotive tire industries. Our job looks like this: first, we produce software for managing production machines, and then we go to the field to put those machines into operation – Labinac explains the business processes in the niche of industrial automation, which in the case of Agenor Automation includes consulting, design, software development, installation, commissioning, education, and maintenance, or support in all phases of execution.

Agenor Automation has completed and is completing jobs in about eighty countries worldwide, actually, wherever industrial facilities are put into operation, it automates and maintains them – from Russia and Ukraine to Egypt and Uganda to Cuba and Bangladesh. Besides industrial automation, which accounts for the largest part of the business, the Poreč entrepreneurs have also entered the niche of building automation, which means that with their solutions, they automate and integrate lighting, heating, cooling, video surveillance, and all other systems in buildings.

– The state of the industry in Croatia is such that it does not offer great options, and for our future, it is essential that we have projects in the domestic market, that our engineers can have a vision of staying in the company even when travel is no longer interesting to them. That is why we started with building automation about ten years ago – Labinac states, who sees the greatest potential for entrepreneurial growth precisely in the segment of building automation, thanks to the development of Internet of Things technology, which is yet to become widely accepted.

You can read the entire article in the printed and digital edition of Lider.

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