Brazil's WEG Aims to Quadruple Its Santo Tirso Motor Business by 2035, and to Start Building Electric Car Chargers There

WEG, the Brazilian maker of electric motors, expects its Portuguese business to grow fourfold by 2035, with its industrial park in Santo Tirso, in the Porto district, at the centre of the plan. The company will close this year with turnover of close to 110 million euros in Portugal and aims for 200 million euros by 2030, Vitor Gorni, WEG's purchasing manager, said at the AICEP Forum at the Palácio da Bolsa in Porto, as reported by the business daily ECO on Tuesday.

"To reach that figure we need to grow 15 percent a year," Gorni said. "That is conservative, because our average since we were founded [in Portugal] is 17 percent a year, so we are confident we will double turnover. And by 2035 we will double again. The potential is to reach 2035 four times above where we are today."

From Maia to Santo Tirso

WEG arrived in Portugal in 2002, when it bought Efacec Universal Motors. Two years ago it moved its operations out of Maia for good, to new premises in Santo Tirso covering more than 100,000 square metres. Even that space soon became tight, Gorni said; this year the company opened a new logistics warehouse, taking raw materials out of the factory to free up production capacity.

The park has two factories, one for low-voltage and one for high-voltage motors, plus a research and development centre and testing facilities. WEG employs about 900 people in Portugal and makes more than 10,000 motors a year, of which around 90 percent are exported. According to Gorni, WEG Portugal is the only unit in the group that brings together five of its business units.

Car chargers next

Part of the growth is meant to come from new lines of business. WEG Portugal has set up an electric mobility department and already supplies electric vehicle chargers from Portugal, though for now they are imported from Brazil and resold. The factory in Santo Tirso is being prepared to manufacture them. "The idea is to make everything here in Portugal in the coming years," Gorni said.

The group is also bringing to Portugal work in energy efficiency, using machines made in the country, in operational efficiency and in renewable energy.

What the targets rest on

The figures are the company's own projections, presented at a forum run by AICEP, the state agency that promotes investment and exports. They assume growth continues at the pace Gorni described. The presentation, as reported, gave no figure for the investment needed or for how many jobs the expansion would add to the roughly 900 staff.

Going from about 110 million to 200 million euros by 2030 is a rise of a little over 80 percent; reaching four times today's level by 2035 would mean turnover of around 440 million euros. If nine in ten motors keep going abroad, most of that growth would be exports.