bq - Engineering in times of crisis

2007 was a fateful year for many countries across the world. The biggest crisis our generation has known started that year and spread faster than anyone could think. The population watched companies, banks and governments breaking down while the global situation was getting worst everyday. It is difficult to start a new project or company in a situation like that, although it does not mean that it is impossible. Indeed, one of the most clever ways to solve this issues is investing on the training of the generations to come and on the creation of new intelligent projects that could rise the economy again. However, the Spanish Government did not do that, but the opposite. Fortunately, there is always people interested in its own ideas, so that is how this company of engineers started growing in times of crisis to become one of the most successful companies of the country in a few years.

Six students of Telecommunications Engineering founded an engineering association in 2005 and started working on the design of their own personalized USB sticks. The company grew so fast -as the crisis had not come yet- and hired more people in the first year. Despite the crisis struck in 2007, the company -named as "Mundo Reader"- decided to start exploring new sections of the technology market and create their first device in 2009; the eBook "booq" (which is also the first idea of their final name 'bq'). The success of this cheap and high-functionality device gave them opportunity to work with big companies as "Telefonica" or "Fnac", as well as the strength to create the current company "BQ" in 2011 and start developing the first smartphone 100 per cent designed in Spain by the beginning of 2013.

In April 2013 they start selling their first smartphone in Spain; bq Aquaris 4.5 (picture above)

"We started very respectfully. Even though the concept of a tablet and a smartphone can look alike, they are not the same. A smartphone is not a small tablet, it is something we can be holding 24 hours a day, so the number of issues for the users is way bigger and you must be very careful with the quality of everything... / It is a very delicate product, it has a lot of advantages, though. Millions of smartphones are being sold, and we wanted to be on that market"

said Rodrigo del Prado -one of the creators- in 2014.

The number of employees on the company has grown from 25 in 2006 to 100 while they were working on the first eBook, and nowadays it has risen to more than 900 employees. This number keeps growing every month with new engineers, as well as the sales that made the number of 3.5 millions € income in 2010 turn into 118 million € income in 2013. That is how the company turned into one of the most successful companies in Spain for the last years. The recent success allowed the company to be interested in other markets, so now they are also developing and selling 3D printers.

BQ wants to compete face to face with international companies like Samsung and Apple by selling similar products to their most successful devices -like Samsung's Galaxy S5 (599€) or Apple's iPhone 5s (699€)-, with a reasonable and cheap cost, accessible to more people. The price for bq Aquaris E5-HD is 199€ and it offers a 5''-1080x1920FullHD screen, Quad Core 1.3GHz CPU, 16Gb memory and many other interesting characteristics, as the 13-18Mpx webcam. Also this device is the first commercially available smartphone running Ubuntu Operative System.

Review of Aquarius E5 HD uploaded on YouTube

I decided to talk about this topic because I think that the fact that young people with good ideas could create a successful company -even when everything around it was going down- is very inspiring. Also this company is trying to hire young engineers with new ideas and spread its products to much more countries like Germany, UK, France and other in the European Union. They are an inspiration for many people in Spain and I personally admire them. Besides, I have been using the smartphone bq Aquarius5-HD (designed 2 years ago) for the last 6 months - it is working better than my last smartphone from a big company!

Sources and interesting links:
wikipedia: (spanish) link
wikipedia (english): link
Story of the company (spanish): link
Interesting review of the company (english): link
bq and Ubuntu (english): link
Spanish Manufacturer BQ (english): link
Sorry about the links in Spanish, but there is not too much information in other languages yet.

by Carlos Durango - 2015