14 DAY TRIAL // Two days ago, Nokia announced that it will close its manufacturing plant from Bochum, Germany, and transfer production to other plants in order to lower production costs. Opened more than 20 years ago, in 1987, the Bochum Nokia factory currently has more than 2,300 employees that will be affected after the plant closes its doors.
"The planned closure of the Bochum production site is necessary to secure Nokia's long-term competitiveness," said on 15 January Veli Sundb?ck, Executive Vice President of Nokia and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Nokia GmbH. "Due to market changes and increasing requirements for cost-effectiveness, production of mobile devices in Germany is no longer feasible for Nokia. It cannot be operated in a way that meets the requirements for global cost efficiency and for flexible capacity growth. Therefore we have to make this tough decision."
While nothing seems to make Nokia change this "tough decision", officials from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Bochum is located, intends to recover all (or a part of) the subsidies that the German state paid to the Finnish company since the plant's opening. Juergen Ruettgers, state Premier, said that, over the years, Nokia received almost 90 million Euros in subsidies and, since now it's closing the factory, those subsidies are not justified anymore and should be returned to the German state. Furthermore, the workers from the Bochum plant are surprised that Nokia chose to close the factory and they feel disappointed at the company's decision.
The Dusseldorf state legislature is currently investigating the case, to decide whether Nokia must or must not pay back the subsidies received from the German state.
After the Bochum factory's closing, expected to happen in the summer of 2008, Nokia will transfer most of the production to its new plants from Cluj, Romania and Komarom, Hungary, where production costs are about ten times lower than in Germany. Also, products that demand highly trained specialists will be moved to a plant in Finland.