Primo Meregalli – The Role of BU International in AKKA’s Digital shift

Could you please introduce yourself and describe your role at AKKA? 

My name is Primo Meregalli, I come from Italy and I am the CEO of the AKKA Business Unit International.

Since joining AKKA in 2016, I have led the teams in Italy and Spain, and more recently, in Switzerland, Benelux, The Middle East and China.

How would you say BU International  has evolved in the last 5 years? 

Over the years, there has been a strong focus on diversifying our offering and changing our infrastructure. When I joined AKKA in 2016, Spain and Italy where smaller companies with around 350 people each. Now the new perimeter consisting of the six countries has around 3000 people. For the first three and a half years in Italy and Spain, we changed a lot because we had to improve our presence on the market. In 2016, for example, in Italy, we had 60% of the business on mechanical automotive. Today Automotive is still a relevant sector, though one which now accounts for less than 20% of the business. We have extended the scope of our operations to include, Life Sciences, Aerospace, Finance, Railway, Energy and Telecom.

Apart from our sector shift within these last 5 years, we’ve also diversified our service proposal, with new offerings in Italy, in Spain, China, in the Middle East, Switzerland in manufacturing, software development, electrical, electronic and many others.

I am very satisfied with the implementation of our diversification strategy, by virtue of which last year we were better able to absorb the financial shock of the global pandemic, thanks to the commitment of all the local teams.

What are your main priorities in terms of business for 2021? 

There’s a still a lot left to be done to strengthen our positioning worldwide. Our business is growing everywhere, with many new requests coming in from clients across the BU.  The main goal is for us to hire the best people to meet these new needs, especially supporting our clients in their digital transformation. We are in a strong position to achieve this goal, thanks to the connections we have with universities and improved communication and recruitment strategies.

How are you driving Digital transformation in BU International?

We started internally by digitalizing and speeding up our processes. Now we are offering the same solutions to our clients on the basis of the new tools and competences we have developed.  The market opportunity for digitalization is a tremendous one as there’s a strong need globally, for more digital solutions. This is the reason why we are evolving into new offerings tailored for our clients. Today, we are focusing a lot on Telecom, particularly in web application and optical fiber connection.  A reason for this, is that Telecom is a transversal and flexible sector, and the solutions developed there can easily be exported to other markets.

What is the “AKKA Experience” you propose to your employees? 

I think that for a young person, joining AKKA is an exciting experience because the company is growing a lot in all the countries, so there are many career opportunities. Our consultants are offered to work on innovative and challenging projects for the top industry players in every sector of the engineering field. If I were a young engineer, I would join AKKA! This is a very dynamic and promising environment to build a career.