CPL Concordia, new employees and entry into the foreign market

The 125 years that the CPL Concordia cooperative is celebrating this year is a particularly significant milestone: beyond the century-old age (there are just 2.600 Italian companies that have surpassed one hundred years, according to the National Register of Historical Companies), 2024 marks a return to the turnover peaks of the golden years, those before the 2012 earthquake, which caused €20 million in direct damage to the group, and before the 2015 judicial earthquake, which swept away the top management with allegations of bribes in the Ischia methane gas contracts and caused turnover to collapse by over €100 million in the space of a year.

"It is a chapter that has been archived, already with the approval of the 2023 budget, last June, coinciding with the end of my first three-year mandate, I stressed that we could consider an affair that risked making us disappear from the market, tarnishing our image, behind us, but it was resolved with the acquittal of all charges and with a complete recovery of production values, the reconstitution of reserves and the obtaining of the 2 Star ++ legality rating. Now we are getting ready to toast not only to another year of double-digit growth, with an expected turnover of over 370 million euro (+15% on the 327 million of the last final balance, ed.) but to a scenario of extra-ordinary opportunities that the energy market offers and that we have the tools to seize," explains Paolo Barbieri, reconfirmed until 2027 as president of CPL Concordia. A cooperative founded in 1899 in Concordia sulla Secchia, near Modena, by labourers dedicated to the construction of embankments on the river Secchia, over the decades it has become a leader in the design, construction and management of systems that are no longer just water but energy, including cogeneration, methane gas and remote control processes.

The core business has expanded in recent years to include the entire green transition sector, i.e. hydrogen, biomethane, photovoltaics, geothermal energy, with a global service approach and with injections of artificial intelligence solutions, as written in the 2024-2030 Strategic Plan approved last December. "We are studying further strategic operations, to increase our critical mass by external lines, and we think the time is ripe to land abroad (today 98% of the market is Italy), exploiting our skills and technologies in the field of gas, because in Europe very significant investments in conversion from wood and coal to methane are starting to be made, points out the president, who last March took over the Energy branch of the company Blu Crm, 60 specialists between Milan and Siena in IT solutions for the utilties world (computer software for invoicing, Crm, mobile apps, business intelligence for sellers and distributors of power, gas and water), which places the coop among the top five players in the country in the niche. And last year CPL won the 48 million euro tender to build five hydrogen refuelling stations along the Milano Serravalle motorway, construction sites are underway.

"We are in fact system integrators, with our own specialised workshop, but we are flexible in moving from one energy solution to another, because we do not produce them, and this helps us today not to be affected by the backlash in the electricity market," concludes Barbieri, one of the 670 worker members leading CPL Concordia, which has returned to 1,700 employees (they had dropped to 1,100 in annus horribilis 2016) across 11 operating locations, and another 50 hires are planned between now and December.