The owner of the company PSP Ltd. Julian Dimov with an interview for Offnews

The Bulgarian economy has a chronic disease - it works with low added value, and not a small part of the industry is directed to the production of components and spare parts for global brands.

According to the report "Innovations 2020", in the last year, about 58% of the companies have implemented an innovation, and a little over 30% of those who refrain from innovation activity plan to start a similar project in the next year.

An in-depth analysis shows that in the field of engineering sciences, the process of creating lasting industrial innovations and products with a long market perspective is slower. To some extent this is understandable. The process from design through prototyping to building the entire product manufacturing chain is expensive and requires a lot of human and technological potential. It takes a lot of faith and patience for a company to take on such a challenge.

Avto Engineering Holding Group is one of the few companies that work successfully with Prof. Todorov - one of the leading scientists and his team from the research laboratory "CAD/CAM/CAE in Industry" in the field of rapid prototyping at the Technical University, Sofia . The idea is that a large part of the projects that Avto Engineering Holding Group implements require specialized technical solutions to certain issues, and the company believes that it is good in such moments to approach in the most professional possible way. The meaning of such cooperation is to achieve knowledge transfer, says Prof. Todorov, head of the scientific research laboratory "CAD/CAM/CAE. Our expertise is in how a product is designed, how it is prototyped, how it is validated, and how it is then industrialized, not what the products are. Our customers are a very wide circle - from microelectronics to energy, but the common denominator is in the accumulation of this knowledge. Getting involved in various projects, we also collect specific product knowledge, which we try to apply and transfer. Prof. Todorov himself is a serious name in the field - he is the owner of dozens of scientific developments implemented in our and foreign companies, and industrial projects with partners from France, Germany and Italy, and the team of the laboratory he leads includes three doctors and six masters highly skilled in solving engineering problems.

For vuto Engineering Holding Group, one of the goals is to close the science - business - education triangle. Hiring the laboratory for the company's projects allows students and doctoral students to work there, for whom practical experience at the beginning of their careers is invaluable. In the last year, Prof. Todorov and Avto Engineering Holding Group have been trying to solve a pressing problem - how to utilize used plastic bottles. "We are inundated with plastics," says the professor. In fact, it is a compacting machine with the dimensions and appearance of a waste container, the capacity of the machine allows to reduce the volume of any type of PET packaging up to 7 times, which in turn contributes to the significant reduction of transport costs and reduces the carbon footprint of companies chose this innovation. The cooperation between the laboratory of the Technical University and the Avto Engineering Holding Group began in connection with a public order for the manufacture of "masts" for the antennas of a mobile operator. "We decided that in order to fulfill the task qualitatively, we need to step on the scientific potential of the laboratory, as well as people with serious professional experience in creating products," adds Dimov. The mobile operator immediately liked the fact that we came up with a proposal with full design documentation, and a full set of mechanical and physico-mechanical product tests, and awarded us with the implementation."

The fact that a large part of the Bulgarian industry works as a subcontractor with low margins is a problem, especially at times like this, when the prices of energy and materials are increasing many times, and most of them have contracts that do not provide for indexation, and this reduces their profits even more.

The synergy between TU's laboratory and Avto Engineering Holding Group has worked well - the holding is currently producing with its production facilities elements of a hydropower plant project that the laboratory is carrying out for a large client from Hong Kong.

"Avto Engineering is a valuable partner because they are proactive and have many ideas for business - where we do not have special expertise. On the other hand - sometimes we are their contractors, and this is a useful two-way cooperation", explains Prof. Todorov.

The latest project on which the laboratory and Avto Engineering Holding Group are working together is for disposable cups and utensils that are biodegradable and do not create a problem for the environment.

"These are very important projects for us. Our company has been around for 18 years and we have made a name for ourselves in the field of manufacturing and supplying specialized equipment. In the last two years, we have decided that Avto Engineering Holding Group will become more and more green, and work primarily on projects related to renewable energy sources and improving the environment in which we all live and work," concludes Julian Dimov. Link to the article