The Aconno company from Germany that specialises in IoT technology and products intends to invest more than €250,000 in Croatia over the next few months and open offices in Zagreb and Osijek that will employ about a dozen people, it was said at a presentation of the company in Zagreb on Wednesday.

The company is seated in Dusseldorf and these will be its first offices abroad. Its core business is IoT technology which is related to connecting apparatuses to cloud via the internet and is becoming more and more prevalent in life-style and business operations.

Aconno quickly developed from a startup to doing business around the world. In the second year of its operations, in 2016, it generated a revenue of €400,000, in 2018 that increased to €800,00 and this year the company expects a revenue of € 1 million, Aconno’s CEO Miroslav Simudvarac said.

Simudvarac is a Croat, originally from Vukovar. This contributed to the decision that the company’s first expansion outside of Germany be in Croatia, he and Thomas Hollwedel, with whom he launched the company, said, as did the fact that they have come across some very talented and capable young IT experts, programmers and developers in Croatia and very quickly agreed on doing business together.

We intend to employ an additional 70 people in the future with attractive wages because we see talented people here with a lot of know-how and skills that we need, Hollwedel said.

He underlined Croatia’s advantages of being close to European markets as well as having a developed ICT sector and kind people. He added, however, that in the process of launching the company in Croatia they were faced with numerous administrative and bureaucratic obstacles.

Simudvarac said that since being launched the company has invested about €1.2 million in developing its business and that IoT (Internet of Things-Internet) isn’t just about software but also products and hardware, sensors, chips and so on.