NSAnuel Lemos is one of the founders of Enline, who chose Mirandela as the company’s headquarters in Portugal, which has 25 customers on five continents, including national electricity companies from many countries that use the developed software to monitor power lines and equipment remotely.
Portugal was where they tried without success and still have customers in the country, where they are now having a hard time finding interested parties to fill the vacancies they are offering.
“We have great difficulty finding professionals, primarily for business development, people with experience in international markets, and the ability to speak and write in English, among other languages,” Lusa said.
The company has already opened competitions and is continuing with “seven or eight vacancies”, which also include professionals with experience in the electrical or software sector and in the disciplines of information technology and marketing.
“I think it is very important to announce that there is an international software company, which is currently exporting 100% of what it does to the world, something that the Trás-os-Montes shareholders decide, but we need professionals who want to come inside.”
The company has received support from the program to recruit qualified personnel, COESO, and its strategic partner is the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança (IPB), which has “really helped recruit one person” and conducts joint interviews with the others.
Born in Mirandela in the Braganca region, Manuel Lemos is 37, studied engineering in Porto and emigrated to Peru during the 2008 crisis.
He went to work for a German company in the field of energy, paper and transportation, and there he met other foreign engineers and decided to take a risk with them.
This adventure began in 2018 with the development of software for monitoring equipment and power lines that differs from what is on the market in that it does not require equipment or field trips.
They have received support from an EU business incubator, a Portuguese investor, and, more recently, from the incubator of the Vale do Tua Regional Natural Park.
“This process was complicated, we started in Portugal, where unfortunately we didn’t succeed,” he noted.
They knocked on different European doors and the first to open was the Spanish power grid, followed by Austria and Germany, and they currently have customers “in Australia, India, Canada, the United States and several Latin American countries and from Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay.”
The company has offices in Brazil, Peru and Germany and agents and sellers in different countries.
“In Portugal, we are trying to convince various clients such as REN and EDP, among others, to implement our technologies, but unfortunately nothing has been contracted yet, but we are very optimistic that it can still happen this year,” he said.
According to the partner, the technology they have developed makes it possible to anticipate, prevent and correct problems affecting the distribution of power, that is, those that are known to the general public, such as power outages or fires caused by high voltage lines.
The company has technology that creates the so-called “digital twin” of the network or equipment, through which a real reading of what is happening and “diagnosing and informing the customer about potential failures or events and how to correct them before they occur or when they occur.”
This technology also aims to improve power and reduce losses by up to 25% or control vegetation along the lines, as well as fires caused by transmission lines, through sparks from electrical discharge or short circuits.
This technology is being applied to “nearly two thousand kilometers of lines around the world, with official sales starting just over a year ago”.
The perspective is “by the end of the year to double that value and next year it reaches ten to fifteen thousand kilometers and continues to grow.”
Manuel Lemos believes in this growth based on global market figures of “nearly 100 million kilometers of transmission lines”.
Enline’s turnover is “still small” because it is still “in the stage of developing a pilot project with strategic clients”.
Manuel Lemos predicts they will reach the end of the year “with around half a million euros in the works” and hopes to “exceed a million” next year, with a goal of “reaching five million euros between 2023 and 2024”.
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