With today’s shocking news about Vestas announcing so many job layoffs, we’ve dug deep to find some information to make sense of the news.
We found a video interview with Vestas CEO, Ditlev Engel, revealing good background.
The US is Vestas’ biggest market and 32% of their current share capital (before the new share issue was announced today) is held in the US.
They’re investing over $1 billion dollars in new manufacturing facilities in the US. They currently employ 1,300 people in the US and have announced that they will expand this to 4,000 people over the next 12 months.
China coming into market strongly
Vestas’ market share declined globally on 2008, with Engel citing China as the main reason.
In the last two years over 35 wind turbine companies have been created in China alone.
Engel said that “this is changing the dynamic of the global market.
Vestas 24% growth
Growth was 24% and Engel said that Vestas “couldn’t grow much faster,” continuing, “if we had grown more that 24% I was afraid that we would have stumbled because we would have been running too fast.”
Demand is strong. Banks not helping
Engel goes on to make it clear that demand is very strong for turbines, “I’ve never seen in the US and elsewhere such a big emphasis – from the politicians – on really growing new types of energy.”
He went on to describe where the problem lies, “However, if the banks are not doing their job in helping the customers to get things off the ground, that is holding it back. So the answer is, really once things start flowing again and the banks are getting involved, good things will start to happen.”
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Watch for yourself …
