In the middle of the year, the office furniture manufacturing and trading group Narbutas will begin the reconstruction of an existing building and the construction of a new factory building in the Lithuanian town of Ukmergė. The production area will increase by almost 21,000 sq. m (to 57,000 sq. m), and capacity will double.
“This year, in production alone we plan to invest EUR 18 million,” said Petras Narbutas, the owner of UAB Narbutas International.
In the new extension, whose construction will cost about EUR 10 million, workshops for furniture production and sheet-metal processing will be set up, as well as storage facilities for raw materials and finished products.
It is planned that construction of the building will be completed by the middle of 2021. Once the planned capacity is reached, Narbutas will be able to produce 90,400 tables per year (compared with fewer than 45,200 now), 79,900 chairs (compared with 39,900 now) and so on.
It is expected that in the coming years the sales revenue of Narbutas, which reached EUR 99 million in 2019, will increase to EUR 200 million.
“Last year we had enough orders for turnover to exceed EUR 100 million. However, our production capacity turned out to be unsuited to such volumes, so orders were carried over to January,” Mr Narbutas explained.
According to him, the new workshop will not only help avoid so-called bottlenecks in production but will also provide opportunities to introduce new technologies that the factory currently lacks and therefore has to outsource.
If, after completing this stage of development, the company continues to grow at the same pace as before, the production capacity will be enough for about a couple of years.
“When a company reaches its peak on the eve of a crisis, it has to decide whether to slow down production or expand. Being cautious at first, we added 7,000 sq. m to the factory’s then 30,000 sq. m. However, at the current pace of growth that is next to nothing. So now we are beginning the construction of another extension — this time 20,000 sq. m,” Mr Narbutas said in an interview with Verslo žinios. At present, the largest sales markets for Narbutas International are the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Lithuania. Further expansion is planned in the USA and in new markets such as Spain, Portugal, Australia and the Latin American countries — Peru and Chile.
Sales of Narbutas office furniture are also growing because the company constantly replenishes its range with new products created by Lithuanian and foreign designers.
