Escribano’s is one of those company stories born in a garage. Or in a workshop, which is the Spanish version of the American dream. Its origin dates back to 1989, to a premises of just one hundred square meters in the Madrid town of Coslada dedicated to machining whose managers, Ángel Escribano and his two sons, made every effort to earn the client’s trust. A few decades later, the company is an industrial benchmark and has just become a key piece in the national defense puzzle. The consecration came just a few days ago: Escribano bought 3.4% of Indra, valued at 72 million euros, to become one of its main shareholders. The key to success? His president uses a word, which is also the name of his mother: Constancia.
“Ours is a story of effort, improvement and perseverance, honoring the name of our mother,” says Ángel Escribano, son of the founder and president of the company. He runs it together with his brother Javier, who is the CEO and who has accompanied him in the management of this rapidly growing group. Escribano has been raising turnover at an annual average of 35% for a decade and last year it entered more than 90 million euros and obtained a gross operating profit (ebitda) of 27 million. He gave employment to 600 people, 80% highly qualified.
The two brothers know what it’s like to start at the bottom. Her mother, Constancia, had a haberdashery that she had to get rid of because “at that time, with the entry of what was Pryca, she was left unsold,” explains her son Ángel de ella. The father worked as a turner and became unemployed. Bad outlook. With these difficulties, they set up the workshop, in which the eldest son, now president, joined as a minor. Javier did it three years later.
“Our father taught us the trade and Javier and I carry it in our blood,” says the president. The beginning was not easy, with a crisis that taught them the importance of selling abroad, which they have not stopped doing up to now. The rest has been “sacrifice, humility, perseverance and also suffering,” says Escribano. Added to this is a very clear principle: “We have always invested everything we have earned”.
One of the first relevant clients was the former Casa, now integrated into Airbus. The current president of Escribano went on a bicycle to ask them to let them make an airplane component and, after several attempts, they managed to supply it at high speed, working on weekends. The international impulse came with Raytheon, to which they have been selling sensitive pieces for twenty years.
In the last decade, Escribano has had two other key moments. About a decade ago he decided to develop his own products and stop being a subcontractor. In industrial jargon, he became a systemist, which forced him to hire engineers and invest heavily in innovation, technology and training. It was a qualitative and also a quantitative leap that allowed it to double its annual turnover and enter larger programs.
The second consisted of the entry in 2017 of the Omani sovereign wealth fund in its capital with 32.2%, which forced the creation of a board of directors. “We had to become professional, although I don’t like this word because we have always been professionals,” says the president. In 2022, the two brothers recovered one hundred percent of the capital and have absolute control over a company that already obtains 80% of its income outside of Spain.
The great movement has been that of the entry into Indra. “It is a good investment because it has a good plan,” says Escribano. “The goal is for the entire defense industry to grow in size and some can contribute to others so that the group has maximum visibility,” he adds. The Escribano group contributes to the capital the profile of an industrial partner, far from purely financial investment and with a promising future. It is not for less: Constancia’s children now have an order book valued at more than 1,000 million euros.
