Crisis at Hella
European automotive supplier Hella is to cut hundreds of jobs as a result of the cloasure of car factories during the Covids-19 pandemic.
CEO Rolf Breidenbach assumes that the worldwide production volume of passenger cars and light commercial vehicles will remain significantly below the planning assumptions and market expectations made before the corona crisis in the medium to long term, and that this will lead to lower capacity utilization of Hella’s global production network.
“In an already declining market environment, our business development last year was additionally burdened by the Covid 19 pandemic,” says Breidenbach. Against this background, the company expects currency- and portfolio-adjusted Group sales in the range of around EUR 5.6 billion to EUR 6.1 billion and an EBIT margin adjusted for restructuring measures, portfolio effects and impairments in the range of around 4.0 percent to 6.0 percent for the current fiscal year 2020/2021 (June 1, 2020 to May 31, 2021).
In response to the difficult outlook, the company intends to further intensify its ongoing cost programs. At the same time, management has decided on a long-term program to sustainably increase competitiveness – which means nothing other than that further jobs in administration and development are now to be cut; there is talk of 900 job cuts at the company headquarters in Lippstadt. At the same time, further structural adjustments in HELLA’s worldwide network of locations are being considered.
In future, development is to focus more strongly on automotive trend topics such as driving automation and software. Vehicle lighting, one of the company’s mainstays, was not mentioned.
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