2023-04-26 16:13:41
It’s an earthquake, a case that says a lot about the anguish of made in Germany, in the face of increasingly threatening Asian competition. The very successful Viessmann group, a specialist in heating systems, founded in 1917, announced on Tuesday April 25 its intention to sell its core business to an American competitor, for an estimated amount of 12 billion euros, to create A “world champion of smart climate and energy solutions”.
The event caused a stir across the Rhine, some politicians are sorry to see a traditional innovative company pass into foreign hands, unable to adapt alone to the upheavals in progress.
The announcement of the deal comes a few days after Berlin announced the outlines of its “heat transition”, which should make it possible to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings: from 2024, any new heating system installed will have to must operate on 65% renewable energy. From next year, no new gas or oil heating can no longer be installed across the Rhine. And by 2030, 500,000 electric, carbon-neutral heat pumps will arrive in German buildings every year, subsidized by the state. The market of the century.
For Viessmann, this reform has a paradoxical consequence: while the group is the German leader in heat pumps, it is unable to increase its production quickly enough to meet the explosion in demand to come, in particular because it still generates a large part of its turnover with fossil fuel heating systems. The risk is to give way to Asian giants, such as Daikin, Samsung or LG, capable of producing large quantities of air conditioning and heat pump systems at very competitive prices.
“A pioneer market”
Viessmann therefore made the radical choice to sell 85% of its business to its competitor Carrier, from Florida, including the very lucrative heat pump specialty. This alliance should allow the German group to push its production and lower its prices.
The American, for its part, hopes to penetrate the European market more easily. “For Carrier, Germany is a pioneer market. I think they want to experiment with it, scale up to deploy heat pumps in the United States. Where applicable, courtesy of the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA] », says economist Jens Südekum, professor of international economics at the University of Düsseldorf.
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