Bankruptcy was avoided, but 2024 still ended on a negative note for the staff of electric bus builder Ebusco. On the last day of the year, the Deurne-based company announced that it would be saying goodbye to 102 of its approximately 620 employees. Just before Christmas, it also emerged that one of the largest shareholders in recent months had been fined millions by the regulator AFM for manipulating Ebusco’s share price.
The reorganization does not come as a surprise: in November the company already announced that reducing its workforce would be one of the measures to get out of the dire situation it has been in for some time. Started in 2012 as a promising start-up, Ebusco was on the verge of bankruptcy in recent months. Results have been disappointing for some time: in the first half of 2024, the bus manufacturer suffered a loss of 65 million euros.
The bus builder has hardly been able to complete buses for months
Major changes
According to the board, this is partly due to a shortage of parts. As a result, Ebusco has hardly been able to complete buses for months. A legal conflict with carrier Qbuzz over the delivery of ordered vehicles was lost last year. Ebusco turned out to be unable to supply the buses, which led to a loss of millions. It contributed to a debt of at least 33 million euros last November.
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One of the solutions implemented by CEO Christian Schreyer last summer was a new share issue. This raised 36 million euros. The company is also entering into a cooperation agreement with the Chinese battery manufacturer Gotion. This includes launching Ebusco’s lightweight bus concept in Asia.
On top of that comes the reorganization. The 102 jobs that will disappear, 16.5 percent of the total, mainly concern work in production and support services. In an explanation, Schreyer calls it “a necessary step to improve Ebusco’s financial performance.”
Another part of the improvement plan is to reduce the number of production locations from seven to five: the factories in Venlo and Deurne will be merged. This should save money. This is necessary because despite the share issue, Ebusco still needs around 25 million euros in working capital to scale up production. An Ebusco spokesperson did not want to say on Thursday whether this money could be released in the short term through the reorganization.
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Price manipulation
Just before Christmas, regulator AFM also reported that it had reprimanded a shareholder in Ebusco because he had tried to manipulate the company’s stock price. This concerns Van Der Valk Investments (VDVI), the investment vehicle of Bob and Bas van den Nieuwenhuijzen, two members of the Van der Valk hotel family and sons of entrepreneur Joep van den Nieuwenhuijzen.
After Ebusco’s IPO in 2021, VDVI owned 23 percent of the shares in the bus company. In the following years, the investor reduced its interest to less than 3 percent. According to the AFM, this was not fair.
In September 2022, the company sold 400,000 Ebusco shares through the bank. Because the sale took place privately, the market had no knowledge of it. It turned out that the brothers simultaneously bought small numbers of shares through the market. In this way they drove up the price – and therefore the price of the much larger stake they sold. A bank employee noticed this and reported the suspicious transaction to the supervisor. He started an investigation “This disrupts fair pricing and undermines confidence in the financial markets,” the AFM says in an explanation. It imposes a fine of 3 million euros on VDVI.
VDVI does not agree with the decision and has appealed against the fine. The brothers previously tried to prevent the publication of the fine decision through the courts. He rejected that objection. VDVI could not be reached for a response on Thursday.