Bosch announced that it will expand to Sibiu the research and engineering division that also conducts tests with autonomous cars in Cluj and also uses AI technologies. Bosch, which owns several factories in Romania, has approximately 10,000 employees, their number increasing by 12% last year. The company continues to hire in 2023.
Bosch officials said at the company’s annual conference that an office will be opened in Sibiu, where hardware and software activities will be carried out. Asked if they chose Sibiu because they would no longer find engineers in Cluj, company officials said that this was not the reason, but the fact that qualified people are also found in Sibiu, and they wanted to take advantage of this.
Bosch invested approximately 410 million lei (approximately 83 million euros) in Romania last year, mainly in the development of production units in the Mobility Solutions business sector in Cluj and Blaj, as well as in the field of research and development, in within the Engineering Center from Cluj.
The Engineering Center has 1,400 employees in Cluj, and this year the construction of a ten-story building will be completed where work began in 2021. The Center operates in areas such as software, hardware and mechanical engineering, reliability engineering and quality validation, but also in the mobility sector. The factory in Jucu, Cluj county, registered growth in 2022, producing, compared to last year, 12 percent more electronic control units for airbags, multi-camera systems and for driving assistance. A new building was built at the Blaj factory.
In 2018, Bosch bought a 44 ha plot of land in Simeria, to invest 110 million euros in a washing machine factory. A year later, the company announced that it would no longer make the factory, because there was no longer such a high demand in the market for these devices. Asked now about the Simeria plans, Bosch said they own the land, but no investment decision has been made.