COUTH opens a new plant at the Hernani Campus of the Basque Country Technology Park to lead the AI sector applied to industrial quality control and in particular to reduce non-quality costs

It is a unique 5,500 square metre building, located on the Hernani Campus of the Basque Country Technology Park, from which the company, founded in 1954 and specialising in industrial traceability and marking solutions, hopes to achieve its goal of doubling its turnover by the end of 2025.

Last year, COUTH grew by 9.7% to reach a turnover of 15.5 M€, with sales abroad accounting for 87% of its turnover.

The event was presided over by Eider Mendoza, Deputy General of Gipuzkoa.

“Our challenge is to focus our efforts on offering solutions that allow us to reduce the non-quality costs of our customers“, said José Antonio Erdozia, CEO of COUTH.

The Gipuzkoa-based company COUTH, specialising in industrial traceability solutions and intelligent artificial vision systems whose solutions are present in 66 countries, officially opened its new headquarters this morning, located on the Hernani Campus of the Basque Country Technology Park. The new building has a floor area of 5,500 square metres, with an investment of 5.5 million euros, and is a unique building with a cutting-edge, energy-efficient design, as it will allow the company to self-consume energy through its system of photovoltaic panels.

Its interior layout is geared towards the efficiency of operations and the promotion of COUTH’s most value-added activities, such as: in-house software developments, both in traceability systems and cutting-edge artificial vision systems; as well as predictive systems for rejects in production processes through the application of artificial intelligence.

The official inauguration was presided over by the Deputy General of Gipuzkoa, Eider Mendoza, who unveiled the monolith commemorating this historic date for the company, accompanied by the Chairman of COUTH, Leonard P. “Buck” Wessell and the CEO of the company, José Antonio Erdozia. The event was also attended by Arantxa Tapia, Regional Minister for Economic Development, Sustainability and the Environment; the Mayor of Hernani, Xabier Lertxundi and the President of the Basque Technology Parks, Estibaliz Hernáez, among other guests who had the opportunity to see the new facilities.

The new business building will provide COUTH with the technological equipment the company needs to be able to grow as it expects to do in the coming years. The company grew by 9.7% last year to reach a turnover of €15.5m.

“We believe that the investment in this new infrastructure located in an environment such as the Euskadi Technology Park will help us, together with a very attractive business project, to attract the necessary talent to achieve our goals”, said José Antonio Erdozia, CEO of COUTH, during his speech.

Following the acquisition in 2022 of the Catalan company E2M, which specialises in the design and manufacture of industrial process sensor systems using artificial vision, COUTH’s international sales in 2023 represented 87 percent of its turnover, consolidating the company’s firm commitment to new lines of applied research using Artificial Intelligence (AI). “Our challenge is to focus our efforts on fulfilling our Vision: to offer solutions that allow our users to reduce their non-quality costs,” said José Antonio Erdozia.

Thus, COUTH’s traceability and artificial vision systems enable its teams to make decisions about which product should be put on the market and which should not.Rejects represent a very costly waste in production processes, as they include material, labour, energy and logistics costs… Given that we have the information about what is rejected and why products are rejected, by analysing process data we want to establish the cause-effect relationship as a starting point for developing predictive models of future rejects in order to prevent and avoid them.

With this, Erdozia explained, “we achieve the reduction of waste that this represents, helping to improve the efficiency of our customers’ production processes, their profitability and future sustainability”, emphasising that in this way COUTH is doing its bit for environmental sustainability.

Reinvestment and commitment

The company’s CEO pointed out that “our goal is to contribute to the profitable growth of our company and, at the same time, to the sustainable development of our society. We are committed to the satisfaction of everyone involved in this project: from our employees to our customers and partners. This building represents a new beginning for us. We are excited about the opportunities that await us here. We want to fill this space with innovation, collaboration and success,” he said.

After thanking all the people who have contributed to making COUTH’s new business building a reality, José Antonio Erdozia concluded his speech by stressing that reinvesting the resources generated “is in our DNA. There is no greater evidence of our commitment to the people who make up COUTH, to Hernani, Gipuzkoa and the Basque Country”.

About COUTH

COUTH develops activities aimed at providing high quality solutions and products to customers and users with industrial marking and intelligent artificial vision sensorisation needs. Headquartered in Hernani (Gipuzkoa) , its international presence comprises 5 subsidiaries in: Barcelona, Turin (Italy), Bochum (Germany), Shanghai (China) and Monterrey (Mexico). More than 35,000 machines with the company’s solutions are working in 66 countries, mainly in large companies in the following sectors: automotive, railway, iron and steel, gas and oil, food and beverages, among others.