The carve-out will affect mostly locations in the Czech Republic, Germany and Romania. But many other countries in Europe will also be concerned, because service and sales employees will be carved out, too.

Dr. Suhr (Head of the High Voltage Motors department) and Mr. Wilhelm (Head of People & Organisation of Innomotics) informed the participants of the meeting about the new subsidiary company.

Dr. Suhr explained, that the separation of the business field “Large Drives Application” (LDA) had already started in 2021. In November 2022, it was decided to combine LDA with a part of the motor business of the division “Digital Industries” (DI) (Low Voltage and Gear Motors) and the subsidiary companies Sykatec and Weiss Spindle Technologies.

This combination will now be named “Innomotics” and will comprise a subsidiary company of Siemens with a revenue of 3 billion € and 14 000 employees worldwide. The headquarter will be located in Nuremberg.

The main factories of Innomotics in Europe are in Mohelnice (Czech Republic), Frenštát (Czech Republic), Nürnberg (Germany), Drásov (Czech Republic), Erlangen (Germany), Berlin (Germany), Tübingen (Germany), Sibiu (Romania) and Maroldsweisach (Germany).

Harald Kern, the SEC president, explained the critical attitude of the employee representatives to this carve-out.
Since the carve-out is only the first step before a intended sell-off by Siemens, this means, that the management wants to get rid of a part of the business, which has been declared as “dirty”, because of its many customers in mining and other activities, which are looked upon as “non-green”. This does, of course, not include the consequence, that the products of these activities are not needed anymore at positively accepted industries like digitalization.

The employee representatives would prefer to keep the business field of “Innomotics” at Siemens to help to improve the ecological quality of mining processes and other so called “dirty” industries. This would be more earnest and credible.

The current global political situation leads to complete unclearness about a possible buyer of “Innomotics”. It would be, for example, unthinkable at the moment to sell “Innomotics” to any Asian company.

Harald Kern also sees it as critical and rather unfortunate, that the complete motor business of Siemens will now be divided between Siemens Digital Industries and Innomotics.

Especially the delegates from the Czech Republic demanded more participation of the union representatives in the carve-out process.
Mr. Wilhelm agreed to these demands. He also said, that, up to now, there will be no changes at Innomotics concerning wages or working conditions. Innomotics remains a part of Siemens for the time being.

Harald Kern described the “Basic Points Paper”, that has been agreed on in Germany between the management and the employee representation and the union. This paper includes crucial points such as binding of collective agreements with the union, employment guarantees and the safeguarding of technological partnerships of Innomotics.

Report: Dirk Linder