Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2012, during Spain’s economic crisis; the profile of Inmecal, including its revenue, workforce, markets and expansion plans for 2013, and the rises in heating oil and electricity prices it mentions reflect that time.
Throughout this crisis, the price of heating oil has gone up, and so has the price of electricity. For many families, these rises are unaffordable for the household budget. For many businesses, they make their premises unviable. This situation is a business opportunity for some companies that set out to offer cheaper alternative energy, as two entrepreneurs from Granada have shown.
Ignacio Toro and Francisco Cuberos are the founding partners of Inmecal, a company set up in 2006 with the aim of bringing innovation to the sector and obtaining energy from organic fuels to cut energy costs, above all for businesses.
These entrepreneurs’ business idea is the manufacture of biomass boilers, an idea that has taken Inmecal to revenue of €2 million.
At first, the idea was to make use of olive pits as fuel, an ecological waste product that is plentiful in Andalusia. Their potential customers are public facilities, schools, hotels, rural guesthouses, heated swimming pools and so on: customers who want to provide heating but in a cheaper, more cost-effective way, since, according to these entrepreneurs, the investment in this type of boiler pays for itself very quickly.
In just six years, Inmecal has managed to stand out in the biomass sector thanks to the quality of its product, the guarantees it offers and its personalised service. They also have the advantage that their boilers can run on any kind of solid fuel, such as olive pits, wood pellets, or almond and hazelnut shells. This has allowed them to compete in the market with manufacturers that have been around for 30 years.
The company currently sells throughout Spain and Portugal, and will soon enter the Italian and German markets. It receives a remarkable number of enquiries through its website from individuals and companies interested in buying its boilers, although online sales were not part of the original idea for the business.
In these six years, the company has gone from modest revenue and 2 employees to a current workforce of 32 and revenue of €2 million, a figure it expects to grow in 2013.
As we can see, there is no crisis in the energy sector if customers find that your product saves them money, while also caring for the environment by producing clean energy.
Featured image: Allie_Caulfield, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
