Uniper to Focus Engineering Services on Decarbonization & Green Customer Solutions

- Future engineering focus to be on Uniper’s own assets and customer offers around Hydrogen, Renewable Energies, Industrial Customer Solutions (ICS) and Net Zero Solutions
- Conventional services business to be discontinued and individual business activities to be divested
- Implementation to start in 2022, involving wide-ranging organizational changes and headcount reduction

Following a strategic review, Uniper has announced plans to fundamentally restructure its Engineering business.

Uniper’s current, stand-alone Engineering business provides services both to Uniper’s own fleet and to Uniper customers, across a range of power generation technologies. The business consists of several legal entities, with a total of about 1,100 employees, mainly located in Germany and the UK.

Despite continuous alignment with changing market conditions, the pursuit of new business opportunities, and individual successes and improvements, the Engineering business has not yet achieved an independent financial contribution to the Group result. Considering a difficult service market environment and a disadvantageous cost position, the recent review determined that a stand-alone Engineering business in the current setup will be unable to meet Uniper’s strategic and financial expectations.

The plans announced today foresee that in future the company’s engineering competencies will be solely focused on Uniper’s own asset operation and its growth priorities of decarbonization and green customer solutions. Customer business will concentrate on Hydrogen, Renewable Energies, Industrial Customer Solutions (ICS), and Net Zero Solutions. This is to provide Uniper’s customers with a clear strategic focus and a holistic approach in these areas going forward.

Service business in the conventional sector will be discontinued and limited to engineering services for operators of nuclear facilities as another new strategic business field. All ongoing projects will be finalized and closed out as contractually agreed, and customers will be individually approached in due course about the potential impact of the plans on existing co-operations.

The implementation of these plans will involve wide-ranging organizational changes and a significant reduction in headcount including divestment of individual business activities. The affected colleagues have been informed about these planning decisions today. In the coming months, the detailed organizational changes and a fair process for their implementation will be worked out, in close coordination with the competent co-determination bodies. The next information on the results and further steps is expected for the first quarter of 2022.

Uniper COO David Bryson: “We are making these decisions with all due respect for the affected employees’ performance and in the awareness that they will be accompanied by far-reaching individual consequences and personal changes. We, the Uniper Board of Management, and the management teams of the affected units will ensure, in close cooperation with co-determination, that a fair process is set up to achieve these necessary changes whilst avoiding hardships where possible. However, we are taking these steps in order to realign engineering competencies for a sustainable future within Uniper. In this way, we are following our decarbonization strategy, in the interests of our own assets and our customers.”