‘I'm very happy doing what I do’. This is Pedro Carreira's prompt response to his career at Continental, where he started in 1988 - ‘it was still Mabor’ - as a trainee engineer and where he is now Chairman of the Board of Directors. In between, he travelled to Brazil, where he led the installation of two factories, and to Romania, where he worked in Continental's production unit. He returned to his starting point in 2013 to take charge of Continental's project in Lousado, Vila Nova de Famalicão.

He says he is fortunate to have ‘always found the right people and to have the alignment of management and a whole team to realise the challenges’, without hiding his satisfaction with the journey he has made.

It was under his leadership that the Famalicão plant became the group's leader in terms of production volume and number one in the production of light tyres.

"We've been number one for six years in a row and no factory has yet managed to repeat the feat.’

Added to this recognition is the German company's investment in Famalicão. ‘In the last twelve years we've invested more than in the previous twenty-five years,’ recalls Pedro Carreira.

These are some of the reasons that led the Mayor of Famalicão, Mário Passos, to recognise Pedro Carreira as one of the ‘Faces of Famalicão European Entrepreneurial Region’.

Today, Continental has almost 3,000 employees and the company's investment strategy in Lousado (around 200 million euros in recent years) has been in equipment, automation, new warehouses and human resources.

‘We will continue to invest in the digital transformation of the company and we are investing almost 100 million euros in automation by 2026, in innovation projects and new technologies.’ Sustainability is another part of the company's structural investment, which is installing solar panels and energy utilisation façades.

As a result of the audacity and quality of the staff at the Lousado plant, it has been possible to attract value-added investments, such as the solutions development centre for the Continental Group or the Continental Engineering Service, as well as the IT solutions development centre just for tyres ‘which already has 100 people and will probably become 4, 5, 6 times bigger than that’.

Regarding recognition, Pedro Carreira shares it with his employees. ‘You have to have the support of the team so that when we launch projects, they take them on board’. Human capital and planning are what Pedro Carreira points to as key points for the company's growth. ‘I really like to plan for 10 years. And I don't mind changing that plan every month."

And this management has worked. "Whenever we have projects that aren't approved straight away - and more than 50 per cent of them are approved straight away - after five or six months they sometimes tell us, ’look, what about that project you had? Go ahead!‘, because in Germany they know that we have the project, that it's been studied, we have the people, we have the resources and we're ready to carry it out.’

To this, Pedro Carreira adds the strategic location of the Lousado factory. "Within a radius of 30 kilometres, we are close to several universities, which allows us to recruit quality resources. And that's a huge advantage."

Mário Passos praised Continental's management and the dynamics it has experienced. An example is Famalicão Made IN, a unit clearly geared towards production that has also been transformed into a development factory, Created IN.

‘There is constant investment, constant development and constant challenges to which the company in Lousado has responded by projecting itself into the different units of the Continental group around the world.’

It's worth remembering that throughout this year, Mário Passos has been publicising many of the names that help position Vila Nova de Famalicão as one of the largest and most thriving economies in the country and boosting the municipality's entrepreneurial DNA.