Investments for Fersa Bearings and NKE

The Fersa Group was established in 2016 through the merger of Spanish company Fersa Bearings and NKE Austria. Both companies are internationally active in the development, production and sales of bearings for the global automotive (covered by Fersa) and industrial markets (NKE). The Group is actually investing to extend its production capacities and jointly set up additional factories, as well as to utilise common resources in all business sectors.

NKE will also increase its focus on its four strategic industries: mechanical drives, electrical drives, agritech and fluid technology. The Fersa Group’s turnover exceeded 80 million euros in 2018, with ebitda of 9 million, planning to achieve a turnover of 110 million in 2020, with ebitda of 15 million. “The bearings market is facing a radical change in the next five to ten years – says Thomas Witzler, general manager of NKE -. Especially the automotive market will come under pressure from the growing trend towards electric mobility and the reduced demand for conventional bearings this entails. We expect the capacities that will be freed up through this development to shift from the automotive to the industrial sector, which will result in additional cost pressure”.

NKE is thus investing heavily in the technologies of tomorrow, and because conventional bearing technology is mostly at its limits, the company expects that profitable growth in the long term will be possibile only in niche markets. NKE is therefore focusing on the development of intelligent products, like its sensor bearing. The total workforce in all of the group’s locations is 500 employees, 100 of which work at NKE in Steyr.

Fersa Group management (from left to right): Karl A. Nitsch, Chairman of the Board; Carlos Oehling, CEO of the Fersa Group; Jesús Monforte, sales director of NKE; Thomas Witzler, managing director of NKE

“In Zaragoza, with the factory, logistics, quality control and the R&D department, we employ about 215 people – says Carlos Oehling, ceo of Fersa Bearings -. The facility was recently expanded, but the company believes that the productive capacity can still be increased”. To achieve this aim, Fersa Bearings plans to invest 16 million euros in the facilities in Zaragoza by 2020. In April 2018, the company opened a new warehouse in Zaragoza’s industrial park Plaza (Plataforma Logística de Zaragoza), which involved an investment of 3.2 million euros, necessary to release stock space in the production hall to accommodate new production lines.

Planned by 2020 is the building of an additional warehouse with a height of 16 meters. To further increase production capacities, the building of a fourth production line is also planned by the middle of next year. Fersa Bearings plans to go from the 1.85 million bearings produced last year to more than 3 million. In addition to expanding production capacities in Zaragoza, this will involve an additional production line in Jiaxing, China. In addition, the Fersa Group is continuing investing in digitalization, with investments of 700.000 euro in 2018 in intelligence and information management systems.

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