Successful project in South Korea
INHUS Engineering, one of the largest structural engineering companies in the Baltic States with operations in both Lithuania and Scandinavia, has successfully adapted its experience in the Asian market as well.
The Lithuanians have managed to fulfil the contractor’s expectations and within an impressively short term of six weeks they have completed structural engineering works for a five-storey commercial purpose building located near the city of Seoul in South Korea.
According to Karolis Petrauskas, sales manager of INHUS Engineering: “It was quite a challenge forus to design constructions for a project in a new market within an extremely short term, however, with a team of more than 100 designers, we have successfully focused the necessary resources and employed our extensive experience of engineering services in the export market. The project was implemented in due time, in a high-quality manner and for the agreed price.”
Mr Petrauskas said they started to prepare for implementation of the project by analysing the needs, cultural peculiarities and work principles of the new market. They looked into the national design standards of South Korea and analysed the solutions which are mostly used in the market. They also had to take into account that South Korea is situated in a seismic zone.
According to Petrauskas: “The attractiveness of INHUS Engineering to the contractor and success in the project were also influenced by the experience gained through implementation of Design-Build projects in the BIM environment in cooperation with other INHUS group companies.
By meeting the main requirement of the contractor, i.e. that the design should come up with structural solutions which would reduce costs in the production and construction stages as much as possible, the Lithuanians earned the client’s trust and noticed the interest of other construction companies in South Korea, such as LG, Hyundai, and GS Group.
Mr Petrauskas added: “South Korea is an innovative and technologically developed country, thus, contractors’ requirements for projects are demanding. We are happy that clients are interested in structural design services, therefore, this year we expect to increase the export of engineering services to South Korea.”
In 2017, 65% of INHUS Engineering projects were implemented in foreign markets: in the Scandinavian countries, Latvia, Belarus, Russia and South Korea. The remaining projects were carried out in Lithuania; the main projects were the hotel “Hilton Garden Inn” in Vilnius, buildings of Vilnius County Police Headquarters and Custody in Naujamiestis and Antakalnis, the office building at Saltoniškių g. in Vilnius, the administrative building at Jonavos g. in Kaunas etc.
The Markučiai company group rebranded itself at the start of the year with the name INHUS and joins design, production and construction companies under new names – INHUS Engineering, INHUS Prefab and INHUS Construction – these were formerly known as Concretus Designers, Konstruktorių cechas, Markučiai and RCP Construction.