COBA, Consultores para Obras, Barragens e Planeamento, S.A. Profile

COBA, Consultores para Obras, Barragens e Planeamento, S.A. Profile

COBA Group

PT BUILDS

1962-present, Portugal

Av. 5 de Outubro, 323, 1649-011, Lisboa

1962

Joaquim Laginha Serafim

COBA was founded in Portugal in 1962. It’s a multidisciplinary Engineering and Environment Consulting company that dates back to a group of internationally renowned specialists in vault dams. The leader of taht group was precisely Joaquim Laginha Serafim. Still in the 60s, the company started contracts outside Portugal, particularly in Costa Rica, Greece. COBA founded companies in Spain and Brazil and collaborated on projects in Angola and Mozambique. In July 1969 the company became a public limited company, following its first major work in the area of water supply, precisely with the reinforcement of the Water Supply System in the Lisbon Region.

The seventies were marked by the expansion of the company's areas of intervention, having carried out the first works in the area of Roads and Agriculture, and the geography of that same intervention, having entered the Algerian market. During this decade, COBA was also established, with its own facilities, in Lisbon, inaugurating the COBA building, where the company's headquarters were integrated. With the arrival of the eighties, COBA's intervention extended to the rail and environmental sector, and, in the nineties, this same intervention would reach Morocco and other African and Latin American countries. The projects for the company intensified in these two decades since COBA was benefited greatly from the growth of design-construction contracts and exploration under concession. With this conjecture, the company also started to carry out mapping and registration work. In 1998, the company built what is one of COBA's milestones, the Vasco da Gama Bridge, consolidating a position as a leader in the national engineering services market.

In the new millennium, the company's activity reached countries such as Hungary, Bulgaria, Senegal, Equatorial Guinea and Ghana. With the expansion of COBA's activity and geography, the company created the “COBA Holding”, assuming the format that is still visible today, with companies at a regional level and participating companies. In the decade of 2010, COBA entered the market of energy production. The company was and continues to be one of the main promoters of Portuguese consulting organizations, incentivising the promotion of the national technique abroad. Nowadays, COBA has activities being developed in Portugal and in 35 foreign countries, with more than one hundred and fifty employees. The company built and consulted major engineering works, namely the Cachi Dam in Costa Rica in 1969, the Keddara Dam in Algeria in 1986 and the Lezíria Bridge in Portugal in 2007. It’s registered within international financing organizations, namely the European Union, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the UN (United Nations).