Joint venture with Swoboda Hartmann
Franz Morat invests in e-mobility
Franz Morat and Swoboda Hartmann founded a joint venture at the beginning of March. The core business of Morat Swoboda Motion will be drive technologies for e-mobility. A production plant is being built in Nowa Ruda in Poland.
Both companies hold 50% of the shares in the joint venture, Morat Swoboda Motion, which was founded at the beginning of March 2018. The core business of the newly founded company will be 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 components. The long-established Eisenbach-based company has already 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 Franz Morat. "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."
Swoboda Hartmann 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 Franz Morat's core areas of gear technology and drive technology. The production plant for the e-motive business, which will initially create around 40 new jobs, will be set up in Poland. Franz Morat has been operating an assembly plant for the Drive Technology division in Nowa Ruda, Lower Silesia, since July 2015. The start of series production is planned for early summer 2019. as
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