Bearing manufacturer Fersa Bearings is building a new engineering and innovation laboratory for the Fersa Group in Zaragoza, Spain. The foundation stone for “Fersa Lab” was laid on 25 February 2022. With an investment of 14 million euros, the new complex will consist of two buildings constructed on a 6,800 square meter site opposite the Fersa Group’s main headquarters. The project is scheduled to be completed in the first quarter of 2023 and will become an innovation reference center for the company’s sectors.

“With this investment, Fersa Group continues its commitment to manufacturing products with more added value and to open up new avenues for Research and Development, with the aim of moving from being an industrial company to a technology company,” said Pedro Pablo Andreu, COO of Fersa Group. “With the construction of the Fersa Lab, a space dedicated to product innovation is created, a place to create intelligent bearings, special materials, and nano-coatings, as well as special solutions specifically for the electric vehicle, renewable energy, and smart mobility sectors. We want the Fersa Lab to be a place where we not only produce but also encourage innovation in a broader sense. We will work on the development of new bearings for the wind energy and automotive sectors, but we also want to design solutions for other types of industries in which we are not yet present.”

“With this innovation center, Fersa Bearings will continue to advance in its vision of designing and manufacturing the perfect bearing, and will provide employees with a space for creativity, research and development as a tool to serve their ingenuity and capacity for innovation, positioning Fersa Group as a technological benchmark in the automotive, industrial and renewable energy sectors,” added Andreu. “Innovation is in our DNA, and Fersa Lab will represent our own space where we can give free rein to our imagination and our authentic nature, in which continuous experimentation is a habit.”

The ceremony was led by Carlos Oehling, accompanied by Fernando Used from Ingennus, engineers and architects of the project, and Maria José Ballarín and Jose Luis Ezquerra from OBENASA, the construction company which will carry out the works. During the event, tribute was paid to Fersa’s cooperative members, represented by Pedro Dubón, the longest-serving employee at Fersa Bearings, who was chosen to lay the first stone. In a glass urn, buried for posterity, the participants placed a Fersa bearing, two copies of the newspapers of the day, a Fersa style dossier with the corporate values, and the commemorative stone of the event.