From KOSTAL Mr Andreas Kostal, Chairman, Dr Ludger Laufenberg, President & CEO, Mr Joachim Grabowski, General Manager KOSTAL Bulgaria, and further local executives attended the ceremony.
In fact, the Pazardzhik-based plant started as a brownfield project in the Southern Industrial Zone of the city and has already been in operation since April 2017 with more than 250 employees up to date. Here, mechatronic modules are manufactured on two shop floors with a total area of 10,000m² and delivered to OEM customers such as Volkswagen and others.
“It is a great pleasure and pride for us to inaugurate this production facility. The credit for building this plant in less than a year goes to the local authorities as well as to the General Manager Mr Grabowski, our chief architect and the project team who managed to turn practically destroyed buildings into new production sites”, said Mr Kostal in his opening speech.
For Bulgaria, the Pazardzhik plant represents a grand foreign investment that will spur the domestic labour market and which will require the region to strengthen local technical / vocational education to serve the demand. The media coverage gives a hint of the significance of the KOSTAL manufacturing facilities for the country: there were 55 newspaper and radio publications as well as three television reports that aired at prime time with national and regional outreach.
(Follow this link to watch the news coverage by the Bulgarian channel TelekabelTV.)