Vestas plans to lay off approximately 220 colleagues in Denmark and Great Britain, following the integration of Vestas and recently acquired MHI Vestas Offshore Wind (MVOW).
The integration of the two companies includes combining, expanding, and simplifying existing functions within Vestas to meet market demand and create synergies.
In the integration planning, the company has seen synergies across several functions, which will unfortunately entail redundancies. The majority of lay offs will be in Denmark. No layoffs are expected of hourly paid employees.
“Since we announced the agreement to acquire MHI Vestas Offshore Wind, we have meticulously planned how we can build a united and strong Vestas organization that can lead and scale up in both onshore and offshore wind. I want to thank everyone for their hard work and dedication during a difficult period where my colleagues have contributed to both the integration planning and execution of commercial commitments. We have now started implementing our integration plans, which unfortunately includes letting around 220 hardworking colleagues go. It is never easy to make such a decision or say goodbye to good colleagues but integrating and simplifying two companies inherently creates overlaps between functions and it’s therefore necessary if we want to create a competitive and scalable organisation”.
Henrik Andersen, group president and CEO of Vestas.
The organizational integration will continue throughout 2021 and include a consolidated and simplified organizational setup, which will be announced internally on February 1, 2021. The new organization will also adopt a strong focus on creating a unified culture rallied around accelerating the energy transition and Vestas’ values of Passion, Accountability, Simplicity and Collaboration.
Vestas will now go into a consultation process with relevant employee representatives and aims to have clarity for most employees by end of January.