News

After 27 years of collaboration Ficosa and German based Huf H ulsbeck & F urst GmbH & Co. KG agreed to finish their collaboration in Spain and Portugal. Huf takes over the shares of 50 per cent Ficosa had held in the company Huf Espana that has two production facilities in Burgo de Osma -Spain- and Tondela -Portugal- (Huf Portuguesa).

The Ficosa’s group Soria Plant has won this year’s edition of the Industrial Excellence awards, organised in Spain by IESE business school together with its counterparts INSEAD (France) and WHU (Germany). The “Industrial Excellence Award” seeks to recognise the work of companies that, thanks to their operating excellence and management quality, contribute to the industrial competitiveness of Europe. The award ceremony was held in Spain for the second time, although it has a long history of more than 15 years in Europe, mostly in France and Germany.

Ficosa and Ichikoh Industries, Ltd. one of the main automotive suppliers in Japan will make a global alliance in the automotive mirror business. The objective of this alliance is to provide better service to their clients by undertaking joint actions on a worldwide basis. The alliance of Ficosa and Ichikoh will form the world’s largest supplier of automotive mirrors. Ficosa-Ichikoh will have a leading presence in North America (United States, Mexico and Canada), South America, South Africa, and also Asia. The footprint in Asia is considered to be especially important by the alliance given its emerging importance on the world stage, as Asia is expected to account for 50% of the worldwide automotive production in 2014.

Ficosa Technology presented its latest innovations in advanced automobile communications in San Francisco, at the annual workshop hosted by the American “NVA – Networked Vehicle Association”. Through these workshops, the NVA provides a meeting place for the different global players involved in the mobility and automotive ICT. They allow companies to present their latest innovations in these fields, as well as to share experiences, discover technological opportunities, and create synergies among manufacturers, providers, universities, and administrations. NVA invited Ficosa as one of the leading provider companies for vehicle communications systems, due to its experience in the integration of these systems into the automobile and the growing portfolio of Ficosa’s technological products.

The Ficosa Commercial Vehicle Division, headquartered in Germany, has launched to the market the first integrated mirror system for Agricultural Machinery.

Technical Press Release.- Vehicle manufacturers tend to integrate all modern communication services into their vehicles. This requires a certain number of antennas to support these services. On the other hand they put the requirement that the antennas should not influence the design and aesthetics of the vehicle, they should be as compact as possible and in the best case not visible at all, at the same time that the solution offers modularity across different car platforms. FICOSA developed such a solution, integrating the antennas into the side mirrors of a car. Paper stresses the in-mirror integration possibilities but also shows other new ideas how to make the well functioning antennas invisible within the vehicle.

Ficosa group closed a Syndicated Loan for a total of 108m euros with 8 financial entities with which the company historically had and continues to have a business relationship. This transaction allows Ficosa to complete one of the most important milestones in the financing plan it began early in 2009, thus allowing the company to significantly improve its permanent sources of financing by shifting some of its short-term debt to long-term and opening new lines of credit to finance working capital requirements, at a time when the Group has been continually increasing its sales after the sharp fall experienced in the final months of 2008 and the first months of 2009.

The European Commission just signed a research agreement with some of the most important European Institutes to fund the development of innovative technologies that will make our vehicles safer and more comfortable in the next future.

Vicen Aguilera, Managing Director of Ficosa Technology and Ramon Praderas, Managing Director of Circuit de Catalunya, have signed a collaboration agreement that permanently joins the two companies in the name of research and development on Ficosa’s part regarding new types of batteries systems for electric vehicles.

The “Battery Pack” developed by Ficosa, combines the battery electronic control, the sensors, the refrigeration system and the communication system of the pack with the main car ECU, into a compact package with the batteries.

Ficosa is presenting its latest advances in ADAS systems, in Vehicle to Vehicle and Vehicle to Infrastructure Communications, and in terms of environmental sustainability, Ficosa is presenting some of the new systems and components that it is developing for electric vehicles, amongst which the highlight is the “packaging” for the batteries of these new vehicle models.

Ficosa has been awarded the 2009 Cambra Design Management Award. The award, organised by the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and BCD Barcelona Disseny Centre, honours companies that have “shown themselves capable of profiting from their overall design management, which in addition to improving their business strategy has also resulted in an optimisation of resources used to differentiate and position their products, all of which adds up to an increase in competitiveness”.