Although Alstom in Santa Perpètua has had the first robot in the sector that autonomously welds a train wagon for a few months, this year the French multinational will reach its hiring record with 1,200 employees. Gone is 2014 when the lack of orders led the company to several hundred layoffs and to sell the land adjoining the plant to balance the accounts.
Now, after an investment plan -in which the repurchase of these lands was included- for a value of 150 million executed since 2016, it faces the next few years without being able to assume more orders as it is at maximum capacity. "We don't have workload problems five years from now," said the factory's director, Cristina Andéniz, during a meeting with the press at the factory. In Santa Perpètua de Mogoda, 340 train cars per year and 110 complete trams can be produced.
For 2023 and 2024, the company plans to invest 20 million. The commercial director in Catalonia, Sergio Boya, explained that "2014 was the lowest moment of workload and what saved the issue was exports." Today half of the activity is the Renfe mega-contract. But at the Santa Perpètua de la Mogoda facilities, operators work on several models at the same time, such as the Barcelona, Casablanca, Frankfurt or Cologne trams.
After incorporating 200 workers last fiscal year (from March to March), in 2023 it plans to hire 190 new employees. With this staff, the company will reach one million hours of production per year. Worldwide, Alstom employs more than 80,000 people.
In Catalonia, the multinational has an industrial center, eight maintenance centers, two innovation centers and a signaling engineering center. The Alstom factory is one of the five largest in Europe and among the fifteen largest in the world.
In addition to the trams, the multinational produces metro wagons in Santa Perpètua for Barcelona, Santo Domingo, and Singapore. As for Renfe, it is building 201 wagons for Cercanías. It will assemble another 10 for Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat and 34 for Luxembourg.
Alstom entered Catalonia in 1989 by acquiring the historic Maquinista (founded in 1855) and in 1993 the firm Macosa (dating from 1857). One of Alstom's main milestones in Spain was the high-speed trains that linked Madrid and Seville in 1992.
