When they tell you to dream big, the realistic (and perhaps a little pessimistic) little voice in your head tells you to keep it small, that it will never happen, that you won't get that lucky... Especially if you've embarked on a humble business with your friend, and the location of said business is in a Croatian village, and in your garage...
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 11th of September, 2019, thirty years ago, two Croatian engineer friends, Frane and Darko, started a modest business in the village of Kalinovac near Đurđevac from their garage. More specifically, they started servicing agricultural machinery.
According to a report from RTL, today they have a factory which boasts an impressive 300 employees, they're one of the largest of their type in all of Europe which produces vehicles and utility equipment, their snowplows, for example, clear snow in Russia. Not only that, but they also produced a Croatian cleaner. A very large vacuum cleaner - the very first Croatian vehicle intended for street cleaning.
Who says our garbage must be cleaned up by foreign machines? Croatia now has its first street cleaner manufactured in the small, unassuming village of Kalinovac near Đurđevac.
"The maximum speed in this operating mode is twelve kilometres per hour. There are cameras. The front camera serves to see what we're vacuuming and what garbage is underneath, and the rear camera to see where we're going," explained Miroslav, a production employee.
"It's very nice to drive it. There's no noise inside, there's a radio, air conditioning, no worries even when you work all day, and it's nice to work in it," added his colleague.
This Croatian invention caught the eye of some Norwegian partners who came to Kalinovac for another job, so they decided to buy it.
"This vehicle is interesting to us because it has a newer look and is more comfortable for the driver. It has a higher roof for the driver. When compared to the competition, they're also cheaper than the others," said Vidar Jansen, a product manager from Norway.
The company will of course offer it to various Croatian cities, but it will clean mostly European metropolises - as this company exports eighty percent of its revenue.
The starting price of the first Croatian cleaner is 80,000 euros for the basic equipment package, of course, the better the equipment, the more expensive the cleaner is.
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