New Structures at ENERCON - and Further Job Losses

At ENERCON, things have been going wrong not only since the Corona pandemic. Last year, the turbine manufacturer from East Frisia, Germany, had already made massive job cuts, thus calling trade unions and politicians into action. This was preceded by years of concentration on the German market and the establishment of a confusing network of suppliers and subcontractors, some of whom worked exclusively for ENERCON. When the German wind market began to stutter violently, ENERCON was unable to counteract and stumbled.

Now everything is set to change, as the company plans to reorganise its production network in Germany as part of its realignment to international markets. To this end, competence centres for plant and generator construction are to be established at the Aurich and Magdeburg sites. The company management has announced that the repositioning will be planned in close cooperation with the existing production partners. The aim is to integrate some of the external companies responsible for this into the ENERCON Group as part of the restructuring process - also under company law.

"We want to integrate production into the core company ENERCON and manage it as an operation of its own in future," announces ENERCON COO Jost Backhaus. "We are seeking talks with the shareholders on this matter. This is a complex project and will take some time, but we are confident that it will be a success. The project is driven by our objective to keep our expertise in the production of our most important key components for ENERCON WECs and put the production sites in Germany in a good position for the future."

To this end, a 'mechatronics centre of excellence' is to be set up at the Aurich/Lower Saxony site in the coming months, which will pool all the production processes and expertise required for the manufacture of nacelles, rotor hubs and E-components, and which will form the control centre for these key components in ENERCON's newly established global supply chain.

Accordingly, a 'generator centre of excellence’ is planned at the Magdeburg-Rothensee/Saxony-Anhalt site. As a generator tail unit, it will concentrate the expertise and production processes required for the manufacture of externally excited and permanent magnet generators of the ENERCON brand.

In addition to manufacturing in target markets due to 'local content' requirements, ENERCON is increasingly awarding production orders to suppliers in 'best cost' countries. "We have to face up to the costing pressure and the competition and change our focus. That is the only way we can survive in the highly competitive international market," explains Jost Backhaus.

Further job losses are now also to be expected, as ENERCON has already announced: "Major changes will have to be made in individual companies. They will have to actively find solutions to deal with the new situation. Due to the challenging framework conditions, we can in particular no longer afford to have redundant structures in Germany," says Backhaus. "We deeply regret the fact that in the course of reorientation we have to part ways with production partners and suppliers who we can no longer cooperate with in view of the global competition."