NEA has made the decision to become a minority shareholder in ITC. The objective that will be reached through this move is to strengthen the positions of both NEA and ITC on the Bulgarian and international markets.

ITC is a transport research company based in Sofia. It was founded as a family company; recently the older generation has retired and the current directors are Vladimir Chakarov and Kristiana Chakarova. ITC started as a transport engineering company and became involved in modelling projctes through cooperation with NEA.

On the 13th of May 2009, the day that Menno Menist and Kristiana Chakarova formally announced the cooperation between the two companies in Sofia Pieter Hilferink (NEA's former director of research) and Kristiana Chakarova first spoke about the initiative. Transport modelling was a new concept in Central and Eastern Europe. ITC became involved in a project on the development of the main transport corridors in Eastern Europe, also known as the Helsinki corridors. NEA was directing this project. During various seminars (in Budapest and Prague) 13 institutes from Central and Eastern Europe and 3 from the West came together to develop an Eastern European transport model.

It was at this time that Kristiana Chakarova decided that transport modelling was the future for ITC. Maybe too early, as the minds in the - at that time - potential Member States were not yet ready for modelling projects. But ITC has succeeded and has gone on to become a leading institute on this topic in the region.

The cooperation between ITC and NEA has extended to other areas, such as urban transport, rail transport and legal and institutional issues. Over the years NEA and ITC have worked together on more than 15 projects. A logical follow-up to the strong cooperation between NEA and ITC was the Atlas EU and Bulgarian Transport Perspectives, which was published in 2006.

The present amount of joint projects and the common ambitions of the two companies have led to this next step in cooperation. NEA and ITC plan to form joint teams working both from Sofia and from Zoetermeer. This will enforce and compliment each others' position on the market. Although the cooperation primarily has a business objective, the present step could not have been made without the personal trust and friendship between the staff members of ITC and NEA who have worked together in the past.

For the clients of both NEA and ITC this cooperation will ensure that the combination NEA and ITC will provide an integrated approach to joint studies, understanding both the transport world in the West and in the Balkans, even better than before.