All the crises of Ansaldo Energia
The crisis at Ansaldo Energia continues: there are no new orders and the company plans to partially relocate from Genoa to Trieste. Meanwhile, the Minister of Economy says that CDP…
Ansaldo Energia, the Genoese energy systems company that closed 2022 with a loss of 559 million euros, has no new orders to work on until 2024. The uncovered hours are 180,000.
THE PROMISES OF CEO FABBRI
Speaking to the unions, with whom he met in recent days, the CEO Fabrizio Fabbri , in office since last April, said that the company "is activating every channel that can bring new orders, focusing on the opportunities with the greatest probability of realization and therefore generating new contracts faster than the market requires on average". As reported by Secolo XIX , to date Ansaldo Energia has offered customers offers for a total value of over 1 billion euros.
WILL ANSALDO ENERGIA MOVE TO TRIESTE?
The tensions between the company's top management and the union secretariats also concern the plans to transfer the production of micro-turbines, electrolysers and other machinery to Trieste, keeping only the engineering part of Green Tech, the unit dedicated to so-called green technologies, in Genoa for the ecological transition. According to the Fiom and Film unions, the plans risk causing the city to lose around a hundred jobs. According to Ansaldo, however, the acquisition of part of the areas of Wärtsilä (a Finnish group that manufactures engines) in Trieste is "an opportunity".
STATEMENTS FROM FIOM AND FIM-CISL
Stefano Bonazzi of FIOM said that "the industrial future of Ansaldo" and Genoa is "linked to green activities", that is, to Green Tech. “But if investments on this front are planned in Trieste, I ask myself: what future do we have?”.
Christian Venzano of Fim-Cisl instead commented on the absence of new orders: "Where have the national power plants that need reconversion gone?", alluding to Enel's projects for the conversion to gas of the coal power plants of Brindisi, Civitavecchia and La Spezia, suspended due to the gas crisis. The cancellation of orders for turbines has weighed on Ansaldo's accounts and prospects.
“The five turbines that the new CEO had announced could be produced […] have not been seen and it is not surprising, given that the money from the recapitalization is almost finished and there are no resources to purchase the materials. The government must intervene to guarantee workloads,” Federico Grondona of FIOM explained to Secolo XIX last month.
Fabbri had guaranteed that "until the end of 2024" the redundancy fund will not be used. In the last six months alone there have been sixty voluntary exits of engineers and technicians, worried about the uncertain future of the company.
WHAT WILL CDP DO (PRIVATE MEMBER COMING SOON?)
Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, which is part of the Ministry of Economy, owns 88 percent of Ansaldo Energia. Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti said that "we must complete the relaunch operation" of the company, which CDP has taken charge of with a recapitalization: the capital increase will be 580 million. Once the operation was completed, Giorgetti hypothesized a redefinition of the role of CDP, perhaps with the entry of a private industrial partner.
The previous private partner was the Chinese electricity company Shanghai Electric, which however went from a 12 percent share to less than 1 percent after the recapitalization. Shanghai Electric had not even taken part in the previous capital increase of the Genoese company, reducing its share from 40 to 12 percent.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/ansaldo-energia-mancanza-commesse/ on Mon, 02 Oct 2023 15:22:36 +0000.