Business | Bought for parts

A $3.8bn deal points to the future of car-parts suppliers

A merger between Schaeffler and Vitesco will create a global components champion

A gearbox made by Schaeffler.
Image: DPA
|BERLIN

“It’s a good deal,” beams Klaus Rosenfeld, chief executive of Schaeffler, a maker of car parts based in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria. In the small hours of October 9th he called Andreas Wolf, his counterpart at Vitesco, a Bavarian rival, to offer to buy the 50.1% of the firm Schaeffler did not already own. The €3.6bn ($3.8bn) transaction, says Mr Rosenfeld, will create a competitive German giant in an industry undergoing a huge shift to electric cars.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Bought for parts”

From the October 14th 2023 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

More from Business

An eagle sweating in his bed with a sign showing a red downward arrow attached to the end of the bedframe

Germans are world champions of calling in sick

It’s easy and it pays well

The illustration shows a man and a woman standing on separate stacks of coins.

Knowing what your colleagues earn

The pros and cons of greater pay transparency



Donald Trump’s America will not become a tech oligarchy

Reasons not to panic about the tech-industrial complex

OpenAI’s latest model will change the economics of software

The more reasoning it does, the more computer power it uses

Donald Trump once tried to ban TikTok. Now can he save it?

To keep the app alive in America, he must persuade China to sell up