Sumitomo builds production facility for high-voltage wiring systems in Spain

The new production facility will be SEBN’s first production facility in Spain and its 23rd plant worldwide. Sumitomo Electric Bordnetze was founded in 1986 as a joint venture between Volkswagen and Siemens under the name Volkswagen Bordnetze. The company was taken over by the Japanese Sumitomo Group IN 2006 and renamed as a result.

“Our investment in this production facility secures SEBN’s position as a major supplier of high-voltage harnesses for the Volkswagen Group,” says Sven-Uwe Niemann, SEBN Board Member and Executive Director of Supply Chain Management, NAFTA Region and Business Center. “The new site will also bring highly skilled jobs to the region.”

SEBN’s new site in Cuenca will manufacture the high-voltage wiring harnesses for the urban electric car family produced by Seat in Martorell and Volkswagen in Navarra. High-voltage cables are used in electric cars to cover the vehicle’s energy and data requirements. For example, high-voltage cables are used for charging cables to power a car.

SEBN intends to create the required production capacity in Cuenca and use a highly automated production process to maximize product quality and quantity. The concept for the automated production of high-voltage cable systems was developed by SEBN in collaboration with sister companies of the Sumitomo Electric Group. The company says automated production is particularly suited as product complexity decreases in the high-voltage range.

The decision in favour of the plant underlines SEBN’s strategy of being geographically close to its customers. It also supports the efforts of the Volkswagen Group and Seat to continue developing Spain as a European centre for electromobility as part of the “Future: Fast Forward” project.

Around 350 employees are to be employed at the new Spanish production facility. SEBN has been represented in Spain since 2001 with a customer service centre in Pamplona and since 2012 with a development centre in Martorell. Production of the Volkswagen Group’s small electric cars at the Spanish plant in Martorell is set to begin at the end of 2025 with the Cupra Raval, as announced by Seat in a recent update on its battery assembly plant there.

In April this year, Hyundai Mobis started construction of a plant in Spain for the production of battery systems for the Volkswagen Group. The plant in Navarra is scheduled to go into operation in 2026 and will supply up to 360,000 battery systems per year for the Volkswagen Group’s future small electric cars, which will be manufactured at the factory in Pamplona, 14 kilometres away.

Update 31 October 2024

Sumitomo Electric Bordnetze has opened its new plant in Cuenca, Spain. As announced above, high-voltage wiring harnesses for the family of small electric cars produced by Seat and VW in Spain are manufactured here.

The company further commented on a LinkedIn post: “As production means to put something in motion, we have chosen “Impulse” as our theme in Cuenca. We genuinely believe this opening marks the beginning of a new era and sets the course for a successful future!”

sebn.com, linkedin.com (update)