“It’s a strong signal that bicycle manufacturer Corratec has chosen Timisoara to expand its investments in Europe. I met them twice this year, when the company – a family business in Germany – was still undecided between several cities in Europe. I told them about the transformation of the city as a hub for production and development in the cycling and green mobility area (…),” said Dominic Fritz, the mayor of Timisoara, in a Facebook post.
Corratec bought a factory in the city that it will convert to make bicycles. The mayor said it was the former Kathrein factory. The German company had an antenna factory in the city, but in 2019 Kathrein’s operations were bought by Ericsson.
The local subsidiary of Swedish giant Ericsson, one of the largest global suppliers of equipment and services for telecom operators, has grown to 5,000 employees after the integration of German group Kathrein’s Timisoara antenna factory, making it the company’s second-largest operation in Europe after Sweden, company officials announced two years ago. Now, the production facility is about to be sold.
Corratec’s investment in Timisoara is not the first of its kind in the city on the Bega, which is thus becoming a hub for bicycle production.
There are also two SMW bicycle factories in Timisoara, one of which opened this autumn, according to the latest ZF data. Both deliver their entire production to Decathlon.
“We will finalize, through our partners at SMW, a bicycle factory located in the south of Timisoara at the end of the year. The objective is to produce 1.2 million bikes in this factory in 2022,” Decathlon representatives said recently.
According to ZF, the sporting goods retailer was already working with two local factories for the production of two-wheeled vehicles before the 2022 opening, one of them being SMW, which had a unit in the same city. Another was a factory in Resita.
Decathlon has announced on several occasions that Romania has the potential to become a big name in the field, which requires investment not only in finished product factories but also in component production facilities, many of which are currently being brought in from Asia.
Romania has only a few larger companies specializing in the production of bicycles, according to ZF data, Eurosport DHS (with Chinese-Japanese owners), NextCity in Resita and Sport Mechanical Workshop in Timisoara, the latter partner factories for Decathlon. The two facilities specialize in the assembly of two-wheel vehicles, with components being brought in from abroad.
The local market also has companies producing bicycle parts, the largest of which is Mechrom Industry, whose entire production is exported to the Italian factories of the same group – Campagnolo, according to the latest ZF data.
Romania’s potential in this market is much greater, however, and production could reach 2 million units (finished goods) within five years, according to previous estimates by market players. Development is now supported by new investment in the sector.
Romania became the EU’s third-largest producer of bicycles, overtaking Germany, last year, according to a ZF analysis based on market data and data from the European statistics office Eurostat.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)