Count Zeppelin’s airships established the fame of Friedrichshafen at the beginning of the 20th century, but it was the automobile that made the city’s fortunes. On the German side of Lake Constance, which serves as a natural border with Switzerland and Austria, ZF laid a brand new, futuristic vessel in the city center just a year ago. The third largest German automotive supplier is showing its ambitions: to be one of the world’s biggest players in the sector.
Since the small town of 60,000 inhabitants, of which he is the first employer – with more than 8,000 employees out of the 146,000 that he has in the world – ZF has carried out a major operation in 2015: at the moment to blow his 100 candles , the group offered itself TRW, an American competitor almost as big as him. The operation propelled him into first league, and closer to the world giants Bosch and Continental. With a turnover Last year, ZF weighed 36.4 billion euros (compared to 18 billion euros before the operation), and now weighs nearly twice as much as the French leader Faurecia.
Conflict with the mayor
These ambitions, however, resulted in a very unusual conflict for the group, which resulted in resignation of the leader Stefan Summit end 2017. At issue: a divergence of views between the latter, craftsman of the acquisition of TRW and eager to continue acquisitions, and Andreas Brand, the mayor of Friedrichshafen, worried about financial risks such a policy. And if the elected has had the last word, it is because the municipality controls since the Second World War the Zeppelin foundation. It owns 93.8% of ZF, according to the model of shareholder-foundations, of which Germany has made a specialty.
In front of the journalists gathered in early spring in Friedrichshafen for the presentation of the annual results of the group, Wolf-Henning Scheider, arrived in emergency a few weeks ago at the head of the group, ensures that he is free to run the company as he sees fit and defends this shareholder model. “This is an advantage, we are not subject to the pressure of capital markets in each of our areas of activity,” said the former Bosch, who led until now the small equipment maker Mahle, two groups also controlled by foundations.
Manage the shift to electricity
His challenge at ZF is to manage the shift towards electricity, which makes the transmission systems on which ZF has built its success potentially obsolete. Its passenger car transmissions thus represent almost a quarter of its sales, alongside its commercial vehicle, chassis or security systems divisions. ZF-TRW is also the world’s third largest producer of airbags, including vehicles from South Korean Kia and Hyundai, which are being investigated in the United States after several fatalities.
If ZF does not bury conventional engines and still believes in the future of its gearboxes, today it also focuses on transmissions for hybrid vehicles, to which it promises a bright future in the next ten to twenty years, and puts the eraser on the electric motors. Its new division dedicated to electromobility does not yet weigh very heavily, with less than 1 billion euros in turnover.
Autonomous car
ZF, which employs 1,400 people in France, also works as its competitors on the autonomous car. He has teamed up with Chinese Baidu and American Nvidia, with whom he has developed his “ProAI” supercomputer, the brains of these self-driving vehicles. The group spent 2.2 billion euros in R & D in 2017, and plans to spend more than 2 billion euros this year. The city of Friedrichshafen accompanies the movement: it has just validated the creation of a test track in the city center to experiment with this new technology.
ZF does not yet exist when, at the beginning of the 20th century, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin took off and perfected his immense airships from Friedrichshafen. The fire, which destroys a device in 1908, causes the emotion in the country and triggers a wave of unpublished donations.
It is thanks to this pot of more than 6 million marks that the Zeppelin Foundation and the airship manufacturer of the same name are born. To improve the transmission systems of its balloons, the latter calls on the Swiss engineer Max Maag, who has developed gears with mathematical precision. In 1915 was born the “Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen”, literally “gear factory”, whose initials form the name of the group.
But the factory is quickly delivering its very precise transmission systems to the booming automotive industry, before equipping trucks, buses, construction machines, tractors … like the tanks of the Wehrmacht, which it delivers. 92% of transmissions during the Second World War.