José Santos

How has Spinarq evolved in the last decade?

Spinarq arrived in Angola with the intention of developing projects for the refrigeration industry. We do both refrigeration as well as air conditioning. In refrigeration, we are talking about temperatures below 15 degrees, and in air conditioning we are talking about temperatures above 15 degrees. Spinarq appears with the Angolan market’s need to have companies willing to develop projects especially tailored for supermarkets and shopping malls. Over time, we developed this kind of services, and now we work for several supermarket companies in Angola. This was already our core business in Portugal; we just had to transform it and transfer it here. We take a project from scratch and carry it out till the end, from design to construction, with special teams for all of this. In order to do that, we brought our competencies to provide support in a certain area. We built the required competences and, meanwhile, other supermarkets, shopping centers were opening. At a certain point, we acquired a specific expertise: turnkey projects for supermarkets. The groups that wanted to start up supermarkets simply gave us the architecture and the building design, and we did the rest.

One general perception within the industrial sector is the lack of formation and technical skills among local manpower. How does Spinarq combat this situation?

Training local people is vital, both for the sustainability of the company and the country. Almost all the employees that started here with us 10 years ago—about 85-90%—are still with us today. Between 10 and 15% of our employees are expatriates. Right now, we have one expatriate for each area, and the rest of the staff are Angolan nationals. One of the challenges has also been the search for specialized engineering profiles. At this time, we already have five Angolan engineers that are making great progress with our support.