Husqvarna to shift its manufacturing facility to Austria from Italy

Husqvarna has decided to shift its production facility from Varese, Italy to one of the KTM factories in Austria. The company has laid off 211 workers and only 30-odd people who belong to the sales and marketing functions are on the company’s pay roll.

As per some reports the losses were mainly because the company has been sitting on more than a year’s worth of ready to sell motorcycles. Also few of their suppliers moved to different countries which directly increased the input costs added to their woes.

Husqvarna was recently bought by KTM CEO Stefan Piere’s holding company, Pierer Industrie AG from the BMW Motorrad for an undisclosed amount. We are expecting that the company will manufacture the high capacity motorcycles in one of the KTM’s factory in Austria and the smaller capacity motorcycles will come from Bajaj’s Chakan plant in Pune.

Stefan Piere also plans to have a common platform that will be shared by KTM, Bajaj and Husqvarna. He wants to go the Volkswagen way which owns many car brands under them and share the same platform and engines. This results into a low cost of manufacturing and building economies of scale.