Talking with Alessandro Bastianelli
Director
Strategic Projects

December 2023

Let’s start with a triumph. New Project for a submarine cables market in Germany.

One premise must be made. In Germany, a first degassing vessel for high-voltage cables manufactured and installed by COMEA has been in operation for just over a month and by the end of the year we will deliver the second one to the customer.

The recently acquired project will further expand the production capacity of the plant, in which we will install a new degassing vessel. It’s a complex system consisting of fully automated mechanical structures, capable of processing XLPE cable per degassing cycle.

Starting a new challenge always brings joy and enthusiasm, but to be reconfirmed is recognition of the good work done and the trust that the customer has placed in COMEA for so many years is reason for us to be proud.

A special thanks goes to all the professionals who work with great enthusiasm, passion and effort, the technical department, production, quality control, software and electrical engineers as well as our partners, especially GH Cranes, our brand for the jib crane that we supply with the machines.

All of them has done and continues to do an extraordinary job. This success is theirs, ours, everyone’s.

Tell us about your role at COMEA.

I currently manage COMEA’s strategic projects throughout their lifecycle up to take-over, performing a coordination and supervision task.

Having an engineering background, however, I cannot avoid to be active part in the design process, especially in the initial concept and R&D phases in team with my colleagues of the Technical Department with whom I started my adventure at COMEA and I have an excellent relationship.

We are a great team, solid, cohesive, who love their job and have as a common objective the company’s expansion, as well as personal and professional growth inside the organisation of which we are a part.

Explain the COMEA’s decision to focus the business on what you define ‘strategic projects’. What are they and which value they bring to the company?

Today the strategic projects represent the company’s core business, practically 80% of our turnover.

Strategic are the turnkey projects, born in 2010 by the need to provide our customers a complete product, converting the company from a mere executor of project-based products to a know-how holder and manufacturer of complete machines.

Through a hard work and a bit of luck, we can say that this transition has been successful for many years already, and COMEA is now an affirmed reality in Europe.

The biggest European players in the submarine cable industry choose COMEA. What are your winning cards?

During the last ten years we have developed machines with very high quality standards in all respects. We started from a solid base of mechanics manufactured entirely in Italy, to which we added top-level electronics, choosing only the best components available on the market.

Our machines have in their critical functional parts a redundancy of 100%, sometimes even 300%, and a number of sensors for process control in some cases ten times higher than similar machines built by our competitors.

The durability, reliability and performance of our machines put us in a leading position compared to what else the market offers.

No less important is our customer focus. Despite the company’s impressive growth, we have been able to maintain a great deal of organisational flexibility, which has always allowed us to meet our customers’ needs in the best possible way.

Crucial is also our cumulated experience. Over the past 15 years we have installed systems all over Europe.

Competence, professionalism, availability and openness are what customers appreciate about us.

What future perspectives is COMEA aiming for?

We are currently making significant investments in R&D.

The aim is to offer new technologies to optimise production time and costs, with a strong focus on energy saving and green technologies. In this process, the implementation of new automation systems, in processes that are already tested and working, will play a key role.

Then there is the market, or more precisely the markets. To date, COMEA is well consolidated in Europe, so necessarily the next imminent step will be a look East and overseas.

My relationship with COMEA goes beyond friendship, it is almost brotherly. The COMEA’s CEO and I have known each other for a long time. We grew up together and shared experiences in our youth.

I remember perfectly the day he proposed me to work at the company. Seventeen years have passed and I have never had second thoughts.

There has always been great esteem and respect between us and, after so many years of work together, things have not changed. The friendship has grown stronger, the trust redoubled, the collaboration intensified.

All this makes even the most difficult days pleasant!