6 May 2021

The Business Factory Auto (BFA), submitted by CEAGA to the “1st National Sustainable Mobility Awards”, has been the winner in the category “NGO, Foundation, Association”. The person in charge of collecting this recognition, at a gala held yesterday morning in Madrid, was the second vice president and regional Minister of Economy, Business and Innovation of the Xunta de Galicia, Francisco Conde, who holds the presidency of the BFA initiative.

The National Mobility Awards have the support of the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda and recognize good practices and initiatives in mobility, both from the public and private sectors. The main objective is to make success stories visible, point out the value of organizations leading the change and facilitate the dynamization of those solutions that best help to generate results with positive impacts in the short, medium and long term.

Within the platform that gives these awards, “Companies for sustainable mobility”, are large companies such as El Corte Inglés, Coca-Cola, Repsol, Allianz or the Atresmedia group. As for the jury members, that ruled unanimously in favor of the BFA among the more than 140 candidatures presented, we can stand out the Secretary of State for Energy, the General Secretary of the Engineering Royal Academy, the Corporate Responsibility Manager of Atresmedia or the president of Ineco, among others.

The BFA president, Francisco Conde, extended the award to all the entities promoting the initiative, CEAGA, Stellantis and the Vigo Free Zone Consortium, as well as to the entire ecosystem that makes possible the right operation of the accelerator: to all the team, to the executive committee members, the tutors, the companies that share their needs and those that allow projects to run pilots at their facilities. All this system contributes to improving the competitiveness of the Galician automotive industry.

With this new recognition, the Business Factory Auto keeps on consolidating itself as a key part of the Galician Automotive Sector and proof of this are the previous awards it has already received, both in Spain and Europe, in recent years:

• December 2020: award in the category of best accelerator at the South Europe Startup Awards.

•June 2019: recognition by the Startup Europe Awards initiative of the Finnova Foundation and the DG Connect of the European Commission as the first “Mobility Startup Europe House”.

•March 2019: international award for best practice by the European Association of Regional Development Agencies (EURADA).

• December 2018: national recognition by the National Federation of Innovative Business Groups and Clusters (Fenaeic).

• October 2018: award for the “best practice developed in a technology park” from the Association of Business and Technology Parks of Spain (APTE).

Therefore, the BFA adds another recognition to the joint work and good know-how of the Galician automotive industry, the Xunta de Galicia and the Vigo Free Zone Consortium, without forgetting the great results already achieved in the first four editions of the accelerator: the creation of 53 new companies, which have generated 450 qualified jobs in Galicia and 82 million euros of grouped turnover.

The Business Factory Auto (BFA) initiative was launched in 2016 by the Xunta de Galicia, the Vigo Free Zone Consortium, the Stellantis Center of Vigo and the Galician Automotive Cluster (CEAGA), which is in charge of its management, to promote and support entrepreneurship and innovation in the automotive industry. Its objectives are the acceleration and consolidation of specialized automotive projects, the transformation of projects into innovative, viable and scalable companies and the attraction of talent to strengthen the positioning of the Sector