Industrial Parks, Innovations, Investments, The Baltic Course No. 27

NP Properties company has always paid much attention to creating environment that would be friendly to innovations and innovative companies by providing the appropriate infrastructure. Most of the small and medium-sized enterprises are unable to upgrade technologies and finance innovations until the company has its feet firmly on the ground. Moreover, in our changing business environment it takes quite a while. Therefore we have often lent a hand to such companies and provided them with the required premises and infrastructure on favorable terms. That way we often exposed ourselves to a financial risk, after all, many of them only had a good idea but did not have practical experience or credit history. Actually, in part, we performed the functions of a business incubator.

The main thing that these companies are getting is high-quality premises in one of the eight industrial parks run by NP Properties; these premises are made functional for the companies during a rather short period, i.e. 3-4 months.

Natural cosmetics MADARA

Skin Laboratory, which makes beauty care products MADARA, can be mentioned as one such new local company. The company uses natural components to produce various facial creams, body lotions, soap and other products that represent the eco-products’ segment in the market.

When getting acquainted with MADARA cosmetics, we were at once captured by the company’s serious approaches to business. For example, they used Latvian scientists’ achievements in developing the product. This signaled about the far-reaching company’s plans; it proved right when provided them with the production premises in our industrial park, NP Business Centre.

At first, MADARA has had a grandiose plan to enter the market with 30 products. There were dreams about different package designs and ideas about distributions. Yet MADARA made its entry to the market with just four products. Currently MADARA products are available in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland and even Canada.

From milk to eco-adhesives

Another unique product made at NP Business Centre is eco-glue for glass and plastic packaging produced by PPE Serviss. The production of this glue involves substances, materials and intermediary products which do not have any harmful effects on the environment and do not represent a source of pollution as they are easily recycled.

Initially the company was in dairy products’ wholesale business dealing, among other things, with such milk processing product as technical casein. Casein is essential in production of various adhesives and this gave rise to the idea of a new future business, i.e. to start making environment-friendly glues.

Powder from car tires

High-Tech Rubber (Nordic Industrial Park) works in the tire processing industry. Old car tires are recycled into rubber granules and powder — the products with maximum added value.

The secret of High-Tech Rubber success lies in the production process. The company has chosen the technological process which requires only about a dozen people to operate the equipment that takes up 2,000 sq. m of the production facility at Nordic Industrial Park. This technology has a much higher efficiency coefficient, as compared to other technologies, and this has been achieved by reducing rubber mechanic treatment during shredding process and replacing it with the chemical treatment. As a result, equipment operational costs are significantly lower but the end-product quality becomes higher. Bottom line: the production technology used by High-Tech Rubber is probably the only one of its kind in Europe.

Foreign high-tech plants

Producing goods with high added value is an integral part of business in many foreign companies which use NP Properties industrial parks as the location for performing some phase of the production or assembly cycles in Latvia.

For example, due to a unique production process the hair extension manufacturer, Easy Hair Coating Factory Ltd. (a branch of the UK-based Easy Hair Enterprises located in Nordic Industrial Park), is the only company in the world that makes hair fibers able to withstand frequent styling and exposure to sun and rain. The company has production facilities in many parts of the world, e.g. in Europe and Asia.

The production facility operating in Nordic Industrial Park in Latvia is dealing with coloring artificial and semi-natural hair fibers. Further processing of the products is done in other locations.

The product is unique for its technology as only 10 workers control the operations at the production facility with the area of some 1,000 sq. m.