Innovation

Sustainable innovation—redefining the role of glass in our lives

From the start, the Pontevedresa Group believed in sustainable innovation as the only way to continue bringing glass to people ensuring safety, resistance, lightness, energy efficiency and avant-garde looks. The Group’s independent shareholding means that today’s returns can be reinvested in developing the technologies and glass materials of the future, thereby upholding a long-term vision that focuses on the client.

+ 33% of our sales invested annually in sustainable innovation.

In 2015, we reached a level of investment in sustainable innovation of over 33% of our turnover. We concluded the process of incorporating all glass transformation technologies by

introducing the most advanced line of curved tempered glass in Spain, with a capacity to process ultra-thin thicknesses of 3 mm and large formats, resulting in materials that are lighter, more versatile, safe and resistant.

A highly specialized innovation strategy

At the Pontevedresa Group, every new product is the result of a cross-cutting process involving the entire organization. At the centre, the Ceptual and Pontevedresa Industrial research teams receive daily feedback from the experience and know-how of all the professionals working at our manufacturing centres.

At Ceptual we process an average of one innovation per day.

Every year Ceptual develops more than 350 new glass-based compositions for the world of architecture and design. Every day an innovation is processed at one of our manufacturing centres.

In 2015, Ceptual set up the Glass Experimentation Centre, the first community of co-innovation in glass. The objective, to create innovations better suited and better adapted to the challenges of contemporary architecture, involving a community of professionals from the fields of architecture, design and glass, alongside universities and other industries, as part of research and development in manufacture.

A result of this co-innovation process is Ceptual-RockSkin®, a new generation of smart solid surfaces, combining glass and natural stone in a single surface. The real texture of natural rock and the full potential of glass for interactive backlighting, with anti-detachment properties, strength and lightness, unlike conventional ceramic or stone exteriors.

We have shown that by innovating features we add value to many industries.

We redefine the capacities of glass in numerous industrial sectors, thereby increasing the added value of their end products. The continuous improvement of the mechanical properties and reliability of glass, the development of increasingly lighter and finely adapted materials, using our flat and curved tempered, flat and curved laminated glass technologies, contribute to the performance and reliability of the end products manufactured by our industrial clients.

Speed of innovation is the result of combining materials engineering with the continuous redesign of all transformation processes.

Innovation in both the manufacturing process and the composition of the end product has enabled us to develop a portfolio of high-performance products for large-scale manufacture.

On the one hand, our processes’ innovations are based on the incorporation of lines of production designed and built according to our specifications and only by European manufactures. This has enabled us to go beyond technique’s traditional limits and to obtain highly advanced materials, as it is the case of those resulted from the TGP – TemperedGlass Plus® process, whose planimetry has accomplished a perfection level widely recognized by our clients.

Innovation in end composition has arisen from applying materials engineering and optics to several processes, particularly the combination of laminated and tempered glass, resulting in technologically advanced glass-based materials, which has enabled us to enter the era of smart solid surfaces through the development of Ceptual TGP Plus Vision ® smart touch tempered glass with a mirror effect.