Coloplast's Biggest Factory Worldwide Is Now Running in Felgueiras: 350 Staff Today and a Target of 800 Within Three Years

The Danish medical-device maker Coloplast has opened what it calls its largest production site to date in Felgueiras, in Porto district. The plant, inaugurated on Thursday, 29 October, employs 350 people and the company expects to reach about 800 within three years, according to the Lusa report carried by RTP. Coloplast told journalists it had invested 100 million euros.

What the plant makes

The factory, in the Alto das Barrancas industrial zone, makes intermittent urinary catheters, used by people who cannot empty their bladder unaided, such as people with spinal cord injuries or spina bifida, according to Coloplast's own page for the site. Lusa describes a two-storey building of more than 50,000 square metres.

The company's project sheet for EU funding gives the details of the money. The project has a total cost of 109,968,621.96 euros, of which 100,236,223.42 euros is eligible. EU support from the European Regional Development Fund, through the Compete 2030 programme, comes to 18,542,624.08 euros, an 18 percent co-financing rate. The sheet says the plant will make two catheter ranges, SpeediCath Flex and Luja.

Why Portugal

Coloplast says Europe accounts for about 60 percent of its global sales. Its executive vice-president for global operations, Allan Rasmussen, said in material handed to journalists that Portugal offers "a qualified and highly specialised workforce" at "a competitive level of costs", and that the site lets the group diversify its European production, "currently concentrated in Hungary". He also cited Portugal's supply of renewable electricity.

Another company executive, Frank Berg Rasmussen, told reporters that how fast the workforce grows will depend on the market, but said the company chose Felgueiras after studying "the capabilities and qualities of the region's workforce".

Pay and the local economy

Labour Minister Rosário Palma Ramalho, who attended the opening, said the plant's workers earn 20 percent more than the average wage in the region. "This kind of investment in Portugal is very important. We want it to continue so as to diversify our economy," she said.

Felgueiras mayor Nuno Fonseca pointed to the town's reliance on footwear. "We know we are in a region built on a single industry. We needed to diversify," he said, noting that a French maker of door and window automation systems had also recently opened a factory in the same industrial zone.

The plant is the second large manufacturing investment announced in the Tâmega e Sousa area in a month, after a Lithuanian water-meter maker laid the first stone of a factory in Paredes in October. It comes as national employment has slipped for four months in a row.

For job seekers

Coloplast's page for the plant takes applications for production work through an online form and lists technical and specialist vacancies on its careers site. The company's local office is at Praça Vasco da Gama in Felgueiras.