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A challenge to Hitachi
No longer unemployed, electrical engineers Birger A. Bergmann (left) and Hans Ove Kristiansen are now customizing converters for electric motors used in office ventilation systems.
The little start-up STRETEK in mid-Norway has found itself a niche in the market for motor speed controllers. The company is now in the process of customizing converters for office ventilation systems. A critical aspect of such systems is that they must not interfere with computers or other types of electrical equipment in their vicinity.
"In this area we are even better than Hitachi itself," say Birger Bergmann and Hans Ove Kristiansen, the two engineers who have started STRETEK. Their environmentally friendly converter meets the EU standards which will be introduced in 1996, but it will be on the market as early as this autumn. "The year of truth for STRETEK will be 1994 - 95. We have to sell about 190 converters a year to survive," says Bergmann.
Founders
Bergman and Kristiansen left NTH in 1991 with their degrees in electrical power engineering. After six months without work they became tired of applying for jobs they never got, so they started to look at the prospect of starting up their own company. In 1992 they carried out a pilot project - a search for the right niche product. This they soon found, and 1993 was devoted to the main project. NFR supported STRETEK to the tune of NOK 541,000, and the Nord-Trøndelag county office of the State Fund for Industrial and Regional Development gave them a further NOK 180,000. The rest of the company's funding was equity capital, which brought the total to about NOK 2 million, believes Bergmann. SINTEF has also given them general technical support and prototype testing services. The STRETEK engineers have also bee awarded inventors´ grants by the State Inventor Consulting Service (SVO), and they won Nord-Trøndelag Industrial Development Office´s prize for the "business idea of the year," in 1994.
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