The EBRD and the EU boost the packaging products manufacturer’s financial soundness
Serbia’s Inmold Plast makes reusable face shields for medical staff. (Credit: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.)
Business advice supported by the EBRD and the European Union (EU) helped a leading packaging moulds manufacturer in Serbia to enhance its financial reporting and improve its market performance. The company is now ready to give back to the community by helping to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
Carving a business out of knowledge
Founded by Goran Jankovic in 2013, Inmold Plast is a family-run tools and packaging products manufacturer in Serbia. Mr Jankovic brings 24 years of engineering expertise to the table in a company that – through investment and innovation – has advanced to the forefront of manufacturing in Serbia.
Inmold Plast has also taken a proactive approach to youth inclusion and access to skills and employment. The enterprise offers regular apprenticeships to students in vocational schools, helping them build technical expertise and develop business acumen.
Having scoped out the possibilities for growth, Inmold Plast found its next niche in the production of robots. The EBRD together with the EU’s Western Balkan Enterprise Development and Innovation Facility (WB EDIF) supported an advisory project in financial reporting in order to help Inmold Plast focus its efforts and achieve growth targets.
Merging theory with practice
When the coronavirus broke out in Serbia, Inmold Plast joined forces once more with the education sector to help stave off the pandemic. The company – which had always maintained collaborative ties with universities – knew that students from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Belgrade were already hard at work producing face shields for medical workers.
“We were familiar with the technology the students were using to make the visors, and we knew there were challenges,” explains Mr Jankovic. “That’s precisely what prompted us to help them speed up the process and set up a serial production line.”
Combining academic knowledge and business acumen increased their production capacity to 4,000 highly protective face shields per day.
Mr Jankovic projects that Inmold Plast will produce and donate 100,000 face shields to meet the critical needs of healthcare professionals working in precarious conditions. Visors will also be donated to medical centres in neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.
“It is a great honour and a pleasure to be able to do our part and contribute with a solution in this time of crisis,” Mr Jankovic added.
Source: Company Press Release