Düsseldorf,
07
October
2021
|
14:31
Europe/Berlin

Uniper to focus Engineering services on decarbonization and green customer solutions

Summary
  • Future engineering focus to be on Uniper’s own assets and customer offers around Hydrogen, Renewable Energies, Industrial Customer Solutions (ICS) and Net Zero Solutions
  • Conventional services business to be discontinued and individual business activities to be divested
  • Implementation to start in 2022, involving wide-ranging organizational changes and headcount reduction

Following a strategic review, Uniper has today announced plans to fundamentally restructure its Engineering business.
Uniper’s current, stand-alone Engineering business provides services both to Uniper’s own fleet and to Uniper customers, across a range of power generation technologies. The business consists of several legal entities, with a total of about 1,100 employees, mainly located in Germany and the UK.

Despite continuous alignment with changing market conditions, the pursuit of new business opportunities, and individual successes and improvements, the Engineering business has not yet achieved an independent financial contribution to the Group result. Considering a difficult service market environment and a disadvantageous cost position, the recent review determined that a stand-alone Engineering business in the current setup will be unable to meet Uniper’s strategic and financial expectations.

The plans announced today foresee that in future the company’s engineering competencies will be solely focused on Uniper’s own asset operation and its growth priorities of decarbonization and green customer solutions. Customer business will concentrate on Hydrogen, Renewable Energies, Industrial Customer Solutions (ICS), and Net Zero Solutions. This is to provide Uniper’s customers with a clear strategic focus and a holistic approach in these areas going forward.

Service business in the conventional sector will be discontinued and limited to engineering services for operators of nuclear facilities as another new strategic business field. All ongoing projects will be finalized and closed out as contractually agreed, and customers will be individually approached in due course about the potential impact of the plans on existing co-operations.

The implementation of these plans will involve wide-ranging organizational changes and a significant reduction in headcount including divestment of individual business activities. The affected colleagues have been informed about these planning decisions today. In the coming months, the detailed organizational changes and a fair process for their implementation will be worked out, in close coordination with the competent co-determination bodies. The next information on the results and further steps is expected for the first quarter of 2022.

Uniper COO David Bryson: “We are making these decisions with all due respect for the affected employees’ performance and in the awareness that they will be accompanied by far-reaching individual consequences and personal changes. We, the Uniper Board of Management, and the management teams of the affected units will ensure, in close cooperation with co-determination, that a fair process is set up to achieve these necessary changes whilst avoiding hardships where possible. However, we are taking these steps in order to realign engineering competencies for a sustainable future within Uniper. In this way, we are following our decarbonization strategy, in the interests of our own assets and our customers.”

About Uniper

Uniper is an international energy company with around 12,000 employees in more than 40 countries. The company plans to make its power generation CO2-neutral in Europe by 2035. With about 35 GW of installed generation capacity, Uniper is among the largest global power generators. Its main activities include power generation in Europe and Russia as well as global energy trading, including a diversified gas portfolio that makes Uniper one of Europe’s leading gas companies. In 2020, Uniper had a gas turnover of more than 220 bcm. Uniper is also a reliable partner for municipalities, public utilities, and industrial companies for developing and implementing innovative, CO2-reducing solutions on their way to decarbonizing their activities. As a pioneer in the field of hydrogen, Uniper is active worldwide along the entire value chain and is implementing projects to make hydrogen usable as a mainstay of energy supply.

The company is headquartered in Düsseldorf and currently the third-largest listed German utility. Together with its main shareholder Fortum, Uniper is also the third-largest producer of CO2-free energy in Europe.

Boilerplate

This press release may contain forward-looking statements based on current assumptions and forecasts made by Uniper SE Management and other information currently available to Uniper. Various known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors could lead to material differences between the actual future results, financial situation, development or performance of the company and the estimates given here. Uniper SE does not intend, and does not assume any liability whatsoever, to update these forward-looking statements or to modify them to conform with future events or developments.

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