Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles will have invested a total of E600 million in its Poznan plant by 2006 after spending E178 million in 2003 alone, those attending a Job One ceremony for the new T5 Transporter in Poznan, Poland were told.
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“Within 10 years, a company with obsolete products has been transformed into an internationally competitive operation with an ultra-modern product programme”, said a VW AG spokesman.
Volkswagen and the Polish automobile manufacturer FSR Tarpan established Volkswagen Poznan GmbH in 1993 as a joint venture. The Volkswagen Group gradually acquired a complete holding in the company by 1996, and a year later Volkswagen Poznan GmbH became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Volkswagen Nutzfahrzeuge (Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles) of Hanover, Germany.
By 2006, VW expects sales of around E1.7 billion compared with a 1993 turnover of E3 million.
VW Poznan originally built light commercial vehicles from assembly kits shipped from Germany and later also built assembled Seat, Audi and Volkswagen cars.
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By GlobalDataIn 1993, 500 employees were building 5,000 vehicles a year but, by 2005, VW expects a production volume of 150,000 vehicles, after 40,000 in 2002. The plant currently employs about 3,300 and the headcount is expected to rise to over 5,000 by 2005. Over 500 new employees have been recruited since August 2002 and may explain why unemployment in Poznan is running at under 7% compard with about 18% in the rest of Poland.
With the new Transporter, the plant has a product of its own for the first time: the crew cab version is built only in Poznan, alongside passenger and dropside versions.
“The days in which our plant was only an extension of the Hanover assembly line are now over,” said Poznan general manager Jörn Reimers.
In 2004, the plant will begin production of the new city delivery van, a replacement for the SEAT-built Caddy and this will be another Poznan exclusive.
Since autumn 1999, when the VW supervisory board approved the Poznan investment programme, hardly any part of the old plant has remained intact: in the past three years, a complete reconstruction has taken place.
Among the biggest individual investments have been the construction of a new paint shop (E104 million), a new body-in-white shop and Transporter and delivery van assembly lines (E126 million).
The result is a full-scale vehicle manufacturing plant with its own logistics, quality assurance procedures and departments such as a pilot assembly shop and a cubing and master-buck centre. The latest laser welding and brazing techniques are used to built the new models.
Poznan will now function as part of the Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles’ flexible production schemewith Transporter manufacture ‘rotated’ between the two plants in Hanover and Poland. ‘Volume-optimised production, as this is known, will also enable Poznan to react more flexibly to market requirements, for instance by building either more city delivery vans or more Transporters.
