Fujitsu closes its computer factory in Augsburg, Germany

Fujitsu has announced that it will close its computer factory in Augsburg, Germany. 1,500 jobs will disappear with the closure of one of the last computer factories in Europe. Fujitsu is bringing production back to Japan.

The plant closure is part of Fujitsu’s centralization strategy, which aims to relocate production and research to Japan. As a result, the company will stop development, production and logistics in Germany and the factory in Augsburg will have to close its doors by 2020 at the latest.

The reorganization affects eighteen hundred employees. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, this concerns fifteen hundred employees of the factory itself and three hundred other Fujitsu employees. According to the company, the restructuring is the result of the shift from products to services. The company wants to focus more on specific technology such as artificial intelligence and the blockchain.

The Augsburg plant is Fujitsu’s only manufacturing facility in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, it is also the last computer factory in Europe, although Dell has another production facility in Łódź, Poland, where it makes servers and desktops. Dell started using that factory in 2008, but wanted to sell it to Foxconn a year later. That sale fell through in 2011.