Armed with knowledge from their previous jobs and a young team around them, the two college friends are aiming for one million euro revenue in their first year in business from exports of Romanian engineering to Saudi Arabia and Australia.
In their offices in a 19th century house once home to a well-known Romanian writer, the about 20 employees of Enevo Group are designing electrical substations and process automation solutions for the industrial and the energy sectors.
“We started the company with export in mind and our product is the know-how. Romanian know-how is really competitive abroad,” says Cristian Pirvulescu, 32, who took on the role of general manager of Enevo. He left his position of business development manager after eight years at Romelectro, a group with EUR100 million revenue.
Today his company is a subcontractor in a power grid upgrade program conducted by an Australian state, which is to adopt the IEC 61850, a communications protocol for electrical substations introduced in 2004 and since turned international standard.
The decision of Australian utility companies to implement the new standard, which is already in place in Europe, presented Romanian engineers with an opportunity to deliver a niche service at a lower price than local experts.
“Engineers are very expensive in Australia, salaries range from 150,000 to 200,000 dollars a year. The cost of a company to keep niche engineers is very high hence the need for outsourcing. They mainly resort to specialists from abroad,” says Radu Brasoveanu, 31, cofounder and vice-president of Enevo.
Before Enevo, he had worked for Aurecon, an energy consultancy, in Australia for a year.
Established at the end of May, Enevo now has 20 full-time employees and 10 independent contractors. Aged 27 on average, most of them are recent Polytechnic graduates and some of them at their first job. Some were part of the teams that competed and even won contests organized by NASA to design a space station and a mining base on an asteroid. The team also includes seven students doing an internship.
The company does not have any employees abroad only representatives who are also partners in a joint venture. The team in Melbourne, Australia, finds and manages relations with clients. The engineering is done in Bucharest, while partners handle the installation and construction. The two owners, however, have to go to Australia from time to time especially before bidding on a new contract.
While the business in Australia came from the contacts Brasoveanu made there, another export contract almost fell into their lap. The two were attending the industrial fair in Hanover this spring, where their company was one of the 6,000 there. Just when they were ready to pack up and leave, after the fair had not turned out to be as successful for them as they had hoped, the representative of a Saudi Arabia company looking for subcontractors for an automation project approached them. A short interview followed and the representative asked them for an offer. Several weeks later they signed the contract for a project at a steel mill of the SABIC, the Saudi Arabian government-held industrial conglomerate.
Enevo operates in the Gulf area via a joint venture with Arab shareholders, registered in Bahrain, a country close to the steel mill.
“Local partnership is very important. It is very difficult to enter Arabia as a small unknown company. We chose Bahrain because this where it is very easy to register a company,” Pirvulescu says.
The two Enevo group owners budgeted EUR1 million revenue for the first year in business, which in their case is only seven-month long. The company has already worked on several photovoltaic parks in Romania, on the electrical substations and a solution to control and monitor them.
More business could come from South Africa and Brazil, where the renewable energy market is still good, Cristian Pirvulescu says.
“It’s about small projects, but the purpose is to build our references and the financial strength to bid for bigger projects.”
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)