Indorama to wind down Steinfort plant, putting about 100 Luxembourg jobs at risk

Indorama Ventures, the Bangkok-based petrochemicals and synthetic-fibres group, has told workers at its Steinfort plant in western Luxembourg that it intends to end production and open a collective-redundancy procedure — a decision that threatens around 100 jobs and would rank as the country's most significant industrial closure in nearly two decades.

The company informed staff representatives of the plan at an information meeting on 30 June, according to the OGBL and LCGB, the two trade unions that represent the workforce. The factory — run by the entity Indorama Ventures Mobility Luxembourg, long known as Textilcord Steinfort — makes technical yarns, cords and fabrics used to reinforce tyres and other rubber products. Its client list has included Continental, Goodyear and Michelin.

For a small country that has fought to hold on to a manufacturing base, the announcement lands heavily. Unions say it is the largest single industrial closure the Grand Duchy has faced in a generation.

A domino effect from across the border

Union officials and Luxembourg media tie the Steinfort decision directly to Indorama's earlier move to shut its plant in Longlaville, a few kilometres away in the French department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. That site, which employs about 165 people, supplied intermediate products that Steinfort depended on; its production stopped for good in late June, according to French regional reporting.

The Luxembourg operation was also heavily reliant on a single customer for the bulk of its output, a concentration the unions say left it dangerously exposed. At group level, Indorama had framed the French closure as a response to intensifying competition — particularly from Asia — alongside shrinking volumes and margins it said it could not reverse despite tens of millions of euros of investment.

• Founded in 1965 by the Belgian-American group Uniroyal Englebert to weave nylon fabric for tyre casings.
• Passed through Continental and the Austrian Glanzstoff group before Indorama Ventures acquired it in 2017.
• Specialises in high-tenacity viscose, nylon, aramid and polyester reinforcement for tyres and technical uses; customers have ranged from tyremakers to ArianeGroup.
• Employed roughly 130 people of 26 nationalities in recent years, according to the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce.

Unions demand that alternatives be explored

The OGBL and LCGB condemned the move as "brutal" and questioned how a group with annual revenue of nearly €12 billion and production sites in more than 30 countries could present the shutdown as unavoidable. In their joint statement, the unions said the decision was "totally unacceptable" and warned that it plunged as many families into deep uncertainty.

It is not acceptable that a closure be presented as inevitable without all industrial alternatives to preserve activity and employment having been seriously explored.

The unions asked what had been done in recent years to diversify the plant's output, win new certifications and reduce its dependence on a single client, and described the workers as victims of "a logic of globalised capitalism that privileges financial considerations." They said staff assemblies and further union action would follow in the coming days. "Since the closure of the TDK site in 2007, Luxembourg has not experienced an industrial site shutdown of such magnitude," the two organisations said.

Ministers asked to step in

The unions have called on Economy Minister Lex Delles and Labour Minister Marc Spautz to examine every option for preserving the site and, should the closure go ahead, to guarantee a proper social plan and a reclassification unit to steer workers into new jobs, in line with a tripartite agreement reached earlier in June. Neither Indorama nor the ministries had set a firm timetable for the wind-down; under Luxembourg law, the redundancy plan and its schedule must now be negotiated with staff representatives.

Part of a wider European retreat

The Steinfort closure is a tangible local marker of a broader squeeze on Europe's energy-intensive and export-exposed manufacturers, which have spent recent years contending with higher energy costs, softer demand and fierce competition from lower-cost producers in Asia. Indorama itself has been trimming capacity across its global footprint, from the French and Luxembourg mobility plants to the shutdown of a purified-terephthalic-acid facility in Montréal-Est, Canada.

For Steinfort's workers, the concern is more immediate. A plant that has spun yarn on the same site for six decades now faces the end of production, and a town in Luxembourg's industrial west confronts the loss of one of its largest private employers. What happens next — whether a buyer emerges, whether the state can help, and on what terms staff leave — will be settled in the negotiations now beginning.