Drive components for e-motives
Franz Morat and Swoboda Hartmann establish joint venture
The Franz Morat Group and the Swoboda Hartmann Group are positioning themselves even more strongly in the booming e-motive market with the new company Morat Swoboda Motion GmbH, which was founded at the beginning of March. Both companies hold 50 percent of the shares in the joint venture.
The core business is the production of drive components for the e-motive sector. In recent years, Franz Morat has established itself as a development partner and supplier of customized metal and plastic gearing parts. The long-established Eisenbach-based company has been manufacturing splined rotor shafts for the drivetrain of electric vehicles and e-scooters for around ten years.
The market for e-bikes and pedelecs has experienced a particular boom in recent years. With their modern design and advanced battery and drive technology, bicycles with electric motors are now appealing to more and more technology enthusiasts and younger people. Franz Morat entered this growth market a good five years ago with the design and manufacture of a spur gear stage consisting of a plastic gear and a steel rotor axle. Last year, the gearing specialist was nominated for the largest single order in the company's history to date for the production of drive components for an e-bike motor. Further large-volume projects are currently in the pipeline or are already in pre-series.
"A new business model was needed in order to successfully handle the current major projects and the associated investments and to continue the strategic expansion of the dynamic e-motive division," says Gökhan Balkis, Managing Director of the Franz Morat Group. "The e-motive market now has similar requirements to the automotive industry. We were therefore looking for an internationally experienced partner who knows and lives the automotive processes and structures".
The Swoboda Hartmann Group has ten locations in six countries and supplies well-known automotive manufacturers with products from the fields of electronics, sensor technology and mechatronics and is therefore not active in the Franz Morat Group's core areas of gear technology and drive technology. "It was clear to us early on that we wanted to cooperate with an industrial company. Even during the initial discussions with the Swoboda Hartmann Group, it became clear that the strategic orientation of both companies and the resulting synergy potential would form the ideal basis for a sustainably successful partnership," explains Balkis.
The production plant for the e-motive business, which will initially create around 40 new jobs, will be built in Poland. Franz Morat has been successfully operating an assembly plant for the Drive Technology division in Nowa Ruda, Lower Silesia, since July 2015. Series production is scheduled to begin in early summer 2019.
Parallel to the establishment of the new production site, the company is investing up to ten percent of the previous year's turnover in the technological development of its core competencies and in the digitalization of processes and workflows. "We will continuously expand our headquarters in Eisenbach into the Franz Morat Group's technology center and drive forward the acquisition, development and expansion of promising gear and drive technology projects there," says Balkis. kp
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