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Evonik to Close Two Sites in Germany

Photo of hands on a laptop — Kaitlyn Baker

Evonik plans to close two smaller sites in Germany by next year. They include around 50 employees currently supplying products for the cosmetics and personal care industry at the company’s site in Hamburg and around 40 employees who produce chlorosilanes in Bitterfeld. These businesses will continue, concentrated mainly at larger German sites. In the coming months, Evonik and employee representatives will negotiate solutions for the employees affected.

"We have strong businesses that successfully meet our customers' needs for high-quality products," explained Claus Rettig, interim chairman of the Executive Board of Evonik. "At the same time, our structures when it comes to production, administration, and laboratories are too fragmented in some areas. This leads to unnecessarily high costs and weakens our competitiveness. That's why we also need to bundle our locations and concentrate our structures in a targeted manner in order to work more efficiently, drive innovations forward more quickly, and thus strengthen our competitiveness."

The Hamburg site is to be closed by the middle of next year. The activities for cosmetics and personal care products will be bundled together with the technological know-how at Evonik’s larger site Essen-Goldschmidtstrasse, thus continuing the business. Essen is already a major site of the Care Solutions business line, to which the Hamburg site also belongs. Like the entire chemicals industry, this business is also suffering from weak global demand and persistent pressure on profit margins in international competition.

Bitterfeld is scheduled to close at the end of April 2027. The decision follows persistently challenging market conditions for high-purity silicon tetrachloride, including increasing supply from Asia and competitive pressure. At the same time, plant utilization has remained at a lower level for an extended period which does not support economically viable operations. Various options including alternative operating concepts, a reduction of capacities, mothballing, and scenarios to sell the site were examined. None of them promised a sustainable economic perspective in the long term.

Learn more about Evonik at evonik.com.

KEYWORDS: general business