The sale of the Smart factory in Hambach, France is about to be completed. The talks with the British petrochemical company Ineos were positive and well advanced, said Daimler on Thursday with. Ineos Automotive submitted a binding purchase offer for Smart France. A decision can only be made when the talks with the employees have been concluded.
“Automobilwoche” was the first to report on the impending agreement. According to the industry magazine, looks too Ineosthe buying process on the home stretch. The British gave no information about the amount of the purchase offer.
The investments announced in 2018 to modernize and expand the plant have largely been made, Daimler said. The construction work included the construction of a new body shop, a paint shop as well as the modernization and reconstruction of the assembly.
The chemical company Ineos founded the subsidiary Ineos Automotive in 2016. At the beginning of July this year, Ineos Automotive boss Dirk Heilmann said the company was interested in buying the French Smart plant. The British want to bring their own off-road vehicle “Ineos Grenadier” in the tradition of the 2016 discontinued “Land Rover Defender” on the market from 2021. Originally, the billionaire Jim Ratcliffe (67) led company wanted to build the off-road vehicle in Wales. Ratcliffe is considered a big Brexit supporter.
Källenius wants to reduce costs radically
In July, Daimler announced that it would sell the one-time prestige project in Hambach as part of an “optimization” of the global production network, thereby responding to the reduced demand for cars. Originally, however, the plans for the Hambach factory were different.
In spring 2018, the then Daimler boss Dieter Zetsche (67) said during a visit to the Élysée Palace in Paris that he wanted to invest 500 million euros in Hambach. He promised President Emmanuel Macron (42) that electric cars would be built there in the future; he brings the real Mercedes brand to France. The plan was to manufacture the new Mercedes EQ series of electric cars instead of the Smart models.
But with the pandemic at the latest, the world looked different, and global car sales collapsed. The plans for the plant changed, and Zetsche had handed over the scepter to Ola Källenius (51). The smart manufacturing is now supposed to be pure Electric car take place in China, it was unclear how things would go on with the plant and the 1,600 employees there.
CEOKalleniusalso plans to lower the breakeven point for the group by 10 to 15 percent and wants to reduce costs accordingly, reported manager magazin in July. He had plant closings calculated around the world.
Globally, including vacancies that have not been filled, around 30,000 jobs could be lost. Daimler generated a total of around 172.7 billion euros in 2019. At the end of 2019, the group had 298,655 employees worldwide.