Lisbon, Oct. 16, 2024 (Lusa) - The CEO of Colep Consumer Products Portugal told Lusa on Wednesday that 99% of the work carried out at the company's new innovation centre in Aveiro district, in north-central Portugal, built at a cost of €3.5 million, is for outside Portugal.
Colep Consumer Products Portugal, which operates in the cosmetics and beauty, personal care and wellness segments, is on Wednesday formally inaugurating the new Innovation Hub (IH) in Vale de Cambra - an investment that the company says consolidates its position as a leader in innovation in the sector and reinforces its commitment to research and development of differentiating products.
Asked which markets the facility will work for, CEO Pierfranco Accardo said that "currently, ninety-nine percent of the work carried out at IH is outside Portugal."
The hub, which is already operational, will have 50 "highly qualified" employees, he added.
"We currently have fifteen university graduates, twenty with a master's degree, one PhD," he explained, adding that the staff include people from eight nationalities - Portugal, Italy, UK, Brazil, France, Germany, Spain and Venezuela - and that "we intend to strengthen the team" in the near future.
The Innovation Hub is "unique in the Iberian Peninsula” because it brings together, in a single space, all aerosol technologies - standard aerosol, Bag-on-Valve, naturally propelled aerosol with nitrogen, among others - as well as the capacity to develop liquids and creams, the CEO explained.
It has a 359-square-metre laboratory part of which is entirely dedicated to packaging tests, "which allows us to test the products we develop in-house," he added.
"Portugal is the place where we have a highly experienced and qualified team," Accardo continued. "Colep Consumer Products has developed a highly professional and qualified team over the years and this was the foundation, the launch pad for this school."
Asked if the hub will use artificial intelligence, he said: "Not yet" but that Colep is "working to develop new partnerships and pilot projects to work with AI."
At the moment, "the work we're doing is trying to find out how AI can help us here, so that we can then apply it."
Colep Consumer Products Portugal is a company with a global presence, operating in Portugal, Poland and Mexico. It has a strategic partnership with One Asia Network, an alliance of three manufacturers (Daizo in Japan, Pax in Australia and Wonder Products in India), which allows it to meet various needs in the Asian market.
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