All of Whirlpool’s lies
Fabio Pavesi's article for Il Fatto Quotidiano
From the announcement on social media by Luigi Di Maio in October 2018 – "we did it, agreement reached with Whirlpool" – to the collective dismissal of the 400 employees of the multinational household appliance announced for Thursday 1 July, as soon as the block has expired. Net of the workers' hope in requesting another 13 weeks of layoffs.
Between the emphasis of that time and the drama of today there is a temporal abyss, a sort of black hole, in which the American company seems to have played with the government and the unions at the poker table. Between promises, postponements – "Whirlpool will not close in Naples", Stefano Patuanelli guaranteed in October 2019 "- and the search for solutions, the top management delayed as much as possible to disguise a bluff that appears to have been studied from the very beginning.
In the group's financial statements at the end of 2018, the intentions of the group were clearly written, in Europe and in Italy. In that accounting document, Whirlpool, which had just signed the agreement on Italy which ensured strategic importance not only for Naples but for all the other Italian sites, explicitly clarified that it would initiate strong cost recovery actions in the EMEA area (i.e. Europe, the Middle East and Africa).
The only global area of the group in trouble with a profitability that became negative already in 2017. It promised a strong restructuring with charges of 200 million dollars and above all heralded a cut in structural fixed costs of at least 50 million dollars. All to be closed by 2019. Of course those 50 million dollars were scattered around the entire region. The exit from Turkey and the downsizing in South Africa were the architraves of the plan. But it was already clear that the hatchet would also fall on Italy and Naples in particular.
The overseas managers of the multinational, those who decide the global strategies and who respond to investors who ask for increasingly greedy quarterly profits, had put it down hard. In the financial statements, they said that the EMEA area resulted in asset writedowns for the beauty of 579 million dollars. Such as to make the entire financial statements of the group listed in New York dye red for the first time in 2018.
Imagine the red alert in the control room. It was necessary to intervene as soon as possible to avoid another year, 2019, at a loss due to only one of the world areas of operation. Also in the accounting document it was put in black and white that only for restructuring charges Whirlpool Emea had put 125 million dollars on the table in 2018.
Read this way the announcement made in March 2019 to reconfirm a new 2019-2021 industrial plan for Italy in which 250 million investments were promised over the 3 years sounds almost mocking. A game of hole card poker makes you think right from the start.
With our institutions, the then minister Di Maio in the lead, who every time took for granted the commitments made by the Italian top management of the household appliances group. The announcement on social media of 30 October 2018 of a galvanized Di Maio remains in the news with a semi-bitter aftertaste: “We did it: agreement reached with Whirlpool. He will not fire anyone and indeed will bring back to Italy part of his production that he had moved to Poland. Nobody will lose their job ”. It all happened while Whirlpool in its balance sheet for that year made clear the bellicose intentions on its least profitable area.
After all, it is difficult to "play" empty-handed against the large multinationals. Not even the promise made by Giuseppe Conte still in 2020 of maximum availability to the company with the promise of incentives, reduction of contributions up to 30% and Sace guarantee on any loans, have moved the American multinational. If this is now history, convulsive and tragic for the workers, the present and the future say that the big white wine has not been affected at all by the impact of the productivity crisis and losses of the Neapolitan plant. If the escapes from Italy could be justified in light of the negative impacts of the time, now much less. Since the negative cycle was immediately interrupted.
On a global level, the moment of the whirlpool industry and Whirlpool is among the most favorable. In 2020, the US company had a global turnover of 19.5 billion dollars with an operating margin that rose from 6.3% to 9.1% in one year. With a record return on investment of 11%, a net profit of 1 billion, when it made 183 million losses in 2018. The US group is bursting with health with a free cash production of 1.24 billion in 2020. Among other things, the company confirms that an operating margin on turnover of over 10% is expected by 2021. The entire EMEA area (Europe and the Middle East), which was suffering at the time of the Naples dispute, regained positive margins last year.
(Extract from an article published in Fatto Quotidiano; here the full version )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/tutte-le-bugie-di-whirlpool/ on Sun, 04 Jul 2021 05:05:33 +0000.