Croatia: Ambroz – a Family-owned Metal-cutting Company Is Greening Production with Fiber Laser Cutting and Norway Grants
The company Ambroz is a family-owned business, operating in the metal industry since 1997. Their products are metal boxes for customers, but they also produce metal parts for a number of companies. The company started as a one-person enterprise, but with development of business, little by little they grew to 18 employees in 2022. Today, the second generation of family members are employed. The family business, the relevant competence and the service it provides to customers are the model that has ensured the company’s steady growth and expansion, even in the turbulent times like these.
To be able to adequately respond to market needs, and keep up with its competition, from the very beginning Ambroz’ strategy has been to reinvest the profit into expanding its business, both by purchasing of new and modern equipment and investing in manufacturing.
Metal production
At this point, the company has all necessary machines for metal production, such as presses, brakes and punch machine. In addition, until recently, Ambroz had to borrow a CO2 cutting laser, and for fine cutting with a fiber laser Ambroz had to use the services of another company. This was not optimal, since it implied stopping the production process to transport the semi-finished to another company for fine cutting, and, afterwards, transporting the cut parts back to Ambroz to finalise production. Productivity was lower, unit costs were higher and the transportation resulted in unnecessary emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Since the company’s strategy is orientated toward greener production with increased efficiency, Ambroz decided to invest into modern Fiber Laser Cutting Machine. In 2020, they applied for funding from the 1st call under the Norway Grants Business development and Innovation Programme.
The application was successful. Ambroz received 159,000 euro in support from Norway Grants to purchase the machine. The implementation is now complete, and the machine is already in operation.
The Norway Grants was a significant financial boost to company’s business and productivity. Ambroz also appreciated the support from Innovation Norway’s employees, who operate the programme in Croatia on behalf of Norway, and whose friendly approach they say made the whole process of receiving the grant and implementing the project easy and pleasant.
Green elements of the project
There are three ways of impact on green element with this project:
- Direct decrease in CO2 emissions due to switching from leased CO2 laser machine that uses CO2 gas to Fiber Laser Cutting Machine,
- Indirect decrease in CO2 emissions, due to savings in energy consumption – Fiber Laser Cutting Machine has much lower energy consumption in comparison to CO2 Laser, since it uses new technology,
- Savings in CO2 due to elimination of transportation – with new machine, there is no need to transport semi-finished goods for fine cutting to another company, since fine-cutting is done in-house.
It is expected that company will decrease pollution of CO2 to environment for about 1,1 tone of CO2 per year.
© EEA grantsBusiness Development and Innovation Croatia
The project is supported by Norway through the Norway Grants. See more on the Business Development and Innovation Programme in Croatia.