Bosch and Mahle plan sale of joint turbocharger business

The Bosch Group and the Mahle Group are seeking a buyer for their joint venture, Bosch Mahle Turbo Systems (BMTS) which was founded in 2008.

With a total of around 1,400 employees, it develops and produces turbochargers for manufacturers of passenger cars and commercial vehicles. Production is largely based in St. Michael/Austria and in Shanghai/China.

In Germany, BMTS also has a presence at two further locations in Stuttgart and Blaichach. Due to the technology used in their production and their high quality, BMTS products have an excellent reputation in the automotive industry.

Need for further investment
The international market for turbochargers is also expected to continue to grow in the years ahead as the trend toward smaller engines fitted with turbochargers, especially for hybrid drives, remains strong. While BMTS has benefited from this market trend, the company is not yet large enough to achieve sustainable success in this market environment.

“Large production quantities and the associated economies of scale represent a critical competitive advantage,” says Dr Rolf Bulander, chairman of the Business Sector Mobility Solutions at Bosch. “Despite bulk orders received from renowned customers, the associated high capacity utilisation at our plants, and above-average growth rates, present sales volumes at BMTS are still too low in comparison with our larger competitors and must be further expanded.”

For this reason, further investments are needed to achieve the company size required in the market. Bosch and Mahle do not intend to drive forward the further expansion of BMTS themselves, because both parent companies need to focus their investments chiefly on new areas of development. “Thanks to our state-of-the-art locations and BMTS’s good products, we are currently confident of finding a prospective buyer, who will successfully expand the business,” states Wolf-Henning Scheider, chairman of the Mahle Management Board and CEO of the Mahle Group.

Employee representatives and employees have been informed about the intention to sell the joint venture. Discussions are taking place with the relevant employee representatives to prepare the next steps in the sale process.

Engineering and products
Exhaust gas turbochargers are a key component of modern, energy-saving, and low-emission combustion engines in passenger cars and commercial vehicles. BMTS develops highly efficient solutions for gasoline and diesel engines, which are characterised by excellent responsiveness, ultra-high levels of efficiency, and optimal acoustics. The company’s most recent achievement is the development of a variable turbine geometry for exhaust gas turbochargers in petrol engines in large-scale production.

In recent years, alongside product development, BMTS has made considerable investments in production processes, including end-of-line testing. It is the world’s first company to test the perfect functionality of each individual exhaust gas turbocharger in a fully automated process at the end of the production line.