Appliance sales plunge: -20 percent. This is the latest disastrous estimate of European sales of household appliances and consumer electronics, a collapse already anticipated by FIRSTonline, with two distinct trends: the heavy drop in free standing (free-standing) and the tightness of high-end appliances and, for household appliances, the built in (recessed), with high added value.
Right at the built in la Whirlpool owes the strong recovery of its shares on the EMEA market, a recovery that was supported by the investments announced and made at the beginning of 2022 (85 million euros), which will continue in 2023 and also in 2024, with new investments (apparently 30 million) for innovative platforms in the Cassinetta (VA) plant, as learned from internal sources. A recovery powered by surprising reshoring which is shifting supplies to the American market under the Whirlpool brand from China to Italy.
Appliances: Whirlpool bucking the trend thanks to the biult-in compartment
This return (refrigerators, freezers, cooking) is surprising but inevitable, as a consequence of the continuing difficulties of the logistics of supplies to the United States and the stimulus of 400 billion dollars, which from 2023 January XNUMX will be allocated above all to convince companies to return to invest in the United States leaving China. One is currently occurring progressive shifting of purchases how then to recreate production centers in the States will take a long time. It should also be emphasized that it is American consumers who increasingly demand efficient products, with theEuropean energy label. More efficient, more refined design of better performance. And the maxim: "We want to be close to the market" also makes its way into the Benton Harbor headquarters.
Household appliances: reshoring from China, the numbers of the new trend
In the Cassinetta plant, in which 180 employees have been hired on a permanent basis, they are produced 740 refrigerators and microwaves and cooking appliances in 2023 there will be a total of around 1,5 million high-end built-in appliances, mostly directed to the USA, largely to replace goods usually coming from Chinese subcontractors. And also for the microwaves from China now mainly low-priced ones arrive in the USA, while those with high quality innovations and performances arrive from Cassinetta which until 2014 ago were manufactured in the Swedish plant in Norrköping. The trend of the Siena freezer plant (predicate for a closure!) which has increased production and exports to the US market with Whirlpool's progressive disengagement from purchases in China. All positive? With some annotations.
Appliances: no manpower can be found, skyrocketing energy costs
A problem that has now become a constant in Italian manufacturing is the lack of suitable aftercare; the search for personnel capable of making up for the increases in production remains unanswered because - and worried recruiters, trade unionists, managers confess it - those who present themselves reveal extremely serious deficiencies, inadequate attitudes, including psychological ones, as well as a very scarce propensity to engage in normal work rhythms . Furthermore energy costs of the Italian factories have become stratospheric, in Cassinetta the bill has gone from 6 to 30 million euros. Despite the generalized drop in demand, the markets will require more and more performing products; it should be remembered that the Whirlpool washing production center in Naples could have had another destiny. A few years later, the judgment on the behavior of the violent fringes (politicians, employees, outsiders and criminals) who have made it impossible to successfully manage the dispute at the Naples plant, which has long been compromised by double-digit absenteeism, which is also a feature of the Carinaro and Comunanza sites.
Whirlpool: CEO Marc Bitzer in Italy, what will happen in January?
What will happen in January? Whirlpool has summoned the trade union representatives of the Italian plants for the'January 11th, while the Corporation announced that the international earnings press conference of the first quarter of 2023 will take place on January 26th. The Corporation CEO Marc Bitzer, who is currently in Italy and then in Germany, will be in Munich where he will attend the meeting of the BMW supervisory board of which he is a member, and will communicate an update on the outcome of the exploration mandate assigned to the president of Whirlpool EMEA Gilles Morel to find a solution to the fate of the EMEA branch, whether to sell or maintain the current structure.
Whirlpool: which brands for sale?
And precisely on this burning topic which sees two "suitors" in the final of the ten who had presented offers, the Turkish Arçelic and the Chinese Midea, it will be interesting to ask Bitzer what would the sale include?: in addition to plants, agencies, branches, offices, also of all the brands with the exclusion - obviously - of the Whirlpool brand, which, moreover, was licensed for a few years to the Turkish Arçelik on the occasion of the recent sale of the production hub Russian?
For example the Whirlpool brand holds 30 percent of the French market: would it perhaps be inevitable to grant the license for the Whirlpool brand for a few years? If the Turkish company were chosen as seems more probable, the Melano site in the Marche region could become central, today technologically advanced like very few other sites in Europe, and already a supplier to the Russian and Eastern European markets of for the cooking. Considering that for months the Turkish company has been investing in the Marche region in an ever-widening area for assistance and logistics.
These and other questions will be addressed on January 26 at the top of Whirlpool Corporation, also because as the epilogue of the story approaches, the experts have the clear sensation that the delicacy of the negotiations requires great transparency on the one hand and great prudence on the other. 'other. To avoid disastrous outcomes since it is now clear that the production sites outside China and close to the sales markets are today not a burden to be lightened, but a resource.
All fake untruthful article for NAPLES ..
Absenteeism in Naples was equal to zero, inform yourself well before writing nonsense!