The company, which belongs to the VW Group, has around 34,000 employees worldwide, 14,000 of them in Germany.
(Photo: dpa)
Munich The truck and bus manufacturer MAN is affected by a production outage lasting several weeks due to the Ukraine war. This means short-time work for around 11,000 employees in Germany, the company said on Wednesday. In addition, an unspecified number of employees abroad are affected. The company, which belongs to the VW Group, has around 34,000 employees worldwide, 14,000 of them in Germany.
According to MAN, there has been a standstill in the Munich and Krakow truck plants since March 14, as well as significant failures at the Nuremberg, Salzgitter and Wittlich sites. This threatens “a loss of truck production for several weeks and a significant reduction in production in the second quarter”. Bus production, on the other hand, is “not significantly affected”.
According to MAN, the reason for the standstill is that suppliers of cable harnesses cannot produce or can only produce to a very limited extent at their Ukrainian locations. Immediately after the start of the war, they began to “duplicate” supplier structures in other countries, but this took several months, said CEO Alexander Vlaskamp.
Other measures to deal with the crisis include a comprehensive spending freeze on non-business-critical activities and a hiring freeze. The board of directors also intends to forego part of their salary in the next three months.
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The Ukraine is one of the most important locations for the production of wire harnesses in Europe. Since the wage costs are particularly low here, almost all well-known manufacturers of wiring systems have settled in the Ukraine in recent years, including Leoni, SEBN, Prettl, Kromberg & Schubert, Aptiv, Kostal, Forschner and Yazaki. Due to Russia’s war of aggression, production by companies in western Ukraine is only possible to a limited extent.
This is a big problem for vehicle manufacturers such as MAN or BMW. Because without cable harnesses, your production will also come to a standstill. The wiring harness is one of the first components to be integrated into every body shell. The network of individual strands and plugs, which often weighs 70 kilograms, is the lifeline of all electronic systems. No truck or car rolls off the production line without this on-board network.
There is hardly a German vehicle manufacturer that does not purchase wiring harnesses from the Ukraine. MAN’s rival Daimler Truck is one of the few exceptions. The three domestic car giants VW, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, on the other hand, have all had to cut back their production in recent weeks due to a lack of parts from Ukraine.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank estimate that a total supply freeze from Ukraine could result in the loss of production of up to 1.5 million vehicles.
With agency material
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