STA, 15 October 2020 - Home appliances maker Hisense Gorenje has officially announced it will start producing TV sets at one of its former facilities in Velenje in January next year. The Chinese-owned company announced that the Hisense Europe Electronic TV factory will involve around 400 jobs in the first stage, 330 of which will be for production workers.
Hisense Gorenje wrote on Thursday that jobs will first be offered to workers from existing production facilities in Gorenje, meaning they will be offered redeployment. The vacated jobs will be replaced with new hirings, the company said.
Part of the staff will also be sought in other Hisense Europe companies, while external candidates will get a chance as well. The workers at the TV factory, which is to produce Hisense TV sets for the European market, will start with training on 15 December.
The factory is being set up in Gorenje's former HZPA production facility. Investment in the equipment is estimated at EUR 7 million.
The planned annual output at four production lines in the first stage is two million sets a year. Capacities and output are then expected to grow in line with market demands to almost four million sets a year by 2023.
Hisense Gorenje is convinced that the new factory will not only contribute to reducing unemployment in the region but will also boost innovation, expand production activities, sustainable development and increase competitiveness and internationalisation.
"Creating a larger number of new jobs in the Savinja-Šalek region has additional weight in the light of the restructuring of this coal-mining region. Additional development potential for the region is harboured by the possibility of setting up a local supply network, which is particularly important for the small business sector," Hisense Gorenje wrote.
The first announcement of a TV factory in Velenje were made in 2018 when Hisense took over Gorenje. Initially a brand new factory was announced worth several dozen million euros and archaeological excavation was under way on a 3.5-hectare location.
Meanwhile, the news was welcomed by the SKEI metal industry union in Gorenje, whose head Žan Zeba said the union "above all expects that all standards and rules valid in our environment will be respected, that Hisense will prove it could also be a socially responsible company". He also mentioned the need for a suitable wage as "the best possible advertisement.
Zeba is, however, concerned about the chance of the new hirings at Gorenje, meant to replace the redeployed workers, being for a fixed term, which would raise what is presently believed to be a 20% share of fixed term contracts at the company.
Meanwhile, Gorenje told the STA the company presently had substantially more orders than in the same period last year and that its capacities were filled until the end of the year.
Gorenje added that strict protective measures at the company had been preventing a spread of Sars-CoV-2, but the epidemiological situation in the country nonetheless presented a substantial risk as regards the fulfilling of the orders. Workers have been asked to behave responsibly outside the company as well.
