Maike Automotive, 1,450 employees, did not escape the dismantling. In difficulty, this large automotive subcontractor in the Arve Valley, in Haute-Savoie, had been placed in backup procedure last summer. After a process of several months, the Grenoble Commercial Court rendered its deliberations on Tuesday: it has awarded two of its four companies, Frank & Pignard and Précial, to consortium formed by local manufacturers Alpen’Tech and Kartesis, associated with the group MGI Coutier (minority). This was the only takeover bid on both companies.
A third subsidiary of the group, EMT, will be taken over by Léman Industries, belonging to the Bontaz family, which was preferred to two other candidates, the family group Mirabeau, and a Chinese group. Finally the fate of the last company that made up the group Maike, Peugeot Japy, will not be known before the end of March. This company based in Valentigney, in the Doubs, is the subject of a separate procedure, because the only buyer interested, the Farinia group, (which was one of its main suppliers), wanted the recovery to be under the form of a assignment plan – unlike other companies included in the backup plan.
95 employees not taken back
While management had ensured that jobs were not threatened, 95 employees of the three companies concerned will ultimately not be taken over, out of the 707 involved: 34 at Frank & Pignard, 6 at Précial, and 55 at EMT. After negotiations, however, the consortium that took over Precial and Frank & Pignard abandoned a first project to reduce the workforce of the two companies from 600 to 250 people by 2020.
Specialized in parts for turbochargers for transmission systems or fluid management, counting among its customers big names such as PSA, Volkswagen or Bosch, Maike Automotive has suffered a growth too fast, poorly managed. Its shareholders (including Naxicap and Bpifrance) had hoped to attract offers from foreign manufacturers, to avoid dismantling. They have visibly failed.