A 22 year journey from energy and telecom infrastructure to general contracting & making cities smart
Now, more than two decades away from starting the company, the begining seems far away as Electrogrup is not for a long time just an „electro” business, but rather a multi-laterally developed company focused more and more on constructions. Adrian Florea, CEO Electrogrup, defines the cross-sector evolution, the strenghts and strategic benefits for clients offered by the companies in E-INFRA.
How do you precieve this evolution inside the company?
I would say we have evolved with the needs of the market and, in particular, of our clients. Indeed, Electrogrup started in 1997 as an energy infrastructure builder. Two years after, in 1999, with the entry of the major mobile operators in Romania, we realized that the two fields have many similarities and that we can definitely use a great amount of resources for both energy and telecom projects. Over time, because a significant component in most energy and telecom projects is that of civil constructions, we have developed inside the company a separate constructions division that started taking over pure construction projectw. So, in the past 5 years, we have grown to become a general contractor focused on industrial projects, but we are already evolving, along with the market needs, towards office and residential. Above all, the new smart city division perfectly completed this evolution. Besides the fact that any type of construction will have, over time, more and more needs for automation and intelligent systems, we strongly believe that cities are the poles of economic development that will control and attract resources in the future.
Which would you say is the biggest challenge you faced throughout these major changes?
I would mention two challenges – the decision to take our services outside the borders, which involves many paradigm changes, the integration in the new markets and aligment to new standards. We currently have subsidiaries in Germany and Poland and recently opened one in the United States. And, of course, the challenge to attract specialized workforce that can maintain the high quality of executions that we never compromise on. In the past few years, almost half of the turnover of the Electrogrup came from external projects and this helped us to address the second challenge – most of our employees work several months a year in projects abroad, where they are paid at the local salary levels and this is an advantage that fules their decision to stay or even to return to the country.
How do all these areas of expertise fit under the same „roof” and how do you put them at work for the benefit of the customers?
Not only do they fit, but this is one of our main differentiators. First, the expertise in all the four areas helps us reduce costs and delivery times and also counsel our clients on how to best approach an optimal integration of energy & telecom sources and, of course, execute it. We do not refrain our experise to Electrogrup, but to that of all the companies in E-INFRA. For example, for an industrial park, we can offer on top the construction of solar energy parks or roofs and power stations that can help save up to 50% of the monthly energy bill. If the building is not very close to the populated areas we can connect it with fiber optics and then sky is the limit for digital and smart appliances. Next to quality, a very important factor is delivering the projects on time and our cross-sector capacities help us react faster and better. To sum up this cross-sector evolution, I think for Electrogrup it was based on vision, opportunity and, very important, entrepreneurial spirit with high ambitions, which allowed the founders to evolve from a services company – Electrogrup, to a group of 5 internationally active companies, E-INFRA, with 600+ employees and 110+ milion Euro revenues last year, covering a wide range of infrastructure service in critical areas – we like to believe that, soon, any type of infrastructure.
