Moved by wind
With Eviag, a new wind turbine manufacturer is forcing its way on to the market. The founders are former executives of rival company Nordex. They're doing lots of things differently - and are now competing with their former employers.
Tucked away in between warehouses, Eviag AG resides in an unprepossessing office building in the extensive Duisburg docks area. That will soon change : a few hundred metres further on the company has acquired a 20,000 m2 plot of land. There, by autumn 2010, a production factory with a management wing will take shape. It is designed for 200 units per year - a number the newcomer will reach in 2012. In the coming year, turnover should be around €60m.
In Eviag, the movers and shakers around the chairman Wilhelm Hecking are pioneers in the field. All come from the milieu of Norderstedt wind company Nordex. At first, the 58 year-old Hecking was head of purchasing at Balcke-Dürr AG, which took a stake in Nordex at the start of the 90s, and later on became director of the Nordex subsidiary Südwind. Until 2003 he even sat on the Nordex board, but was forced to leave his position in the course of the restructuring that followed a dramatic slump in sales. Now he's back and with the newly founded firm, alongside his old employers, is competing in a growing market with famous manufacturing firms like Repower, Vestas, Siemens and GE. An HSH Nordbank study assumes an annual growth rate of 22 per cent until 2012.
While rivals produce everything themselves from tower to turbine to rotor blades, Eviag buys the components in from systems suppliers. That also explains the Duisburg location : many suppliers - for example foundries or the gear train producer Winergy - are based in the region. At the same time, the city is linked to the sea by its inland harbour, which makes logistics easier.
The only thing the company builds itself is its 2.5 megawatt turbine and, for that, it falls back on licence from one of its competitors. It, in turn, was designed by development engineering firm Wind to Energy (W2E) - which also has former Nordex people behind it.
"We bought ourselves four years with the licence," says Hecking. "We're sparing ourselves the development and testing phase. The units have their teething troubles behind them." However, eviag is not allowed to sell them on the German market.
Hecking has an experienced team on board. Peter-Heinrich Boysen, for example, Eviag's engineering and service director, was the technical leader at Nordex. Eviag's finance director Achim Kettlack was in charge of supply-chain management at Nordex until 2004 and before that at Südwind. And Eviag sales director Volker König was actually one of the founders of Nordex.
Starting capital in the double-digit millions was provided by private investors, as well as Stuttgart Invest AG, which holds 27.5 per cent of Eviag's shares. The investors are betting on the experience of the management team. "We're not a start-up. We're a new founding," says Hecking. "Wind moves us," it says in the company logo. As far as the company's management team is concerned, chairman Hecking says the words can be taken completely literally. All left secure management positions to join Eviag. "The euphoria for wind energy is what drives us."
Great expectations
Eviag's planned installation of new wind-power facilities, in units.,
HARALD CZYCHOLL, DUISBURG