Electrolux Shifts Work, Italy Loses 1,719 Jobs

The last kitchen hoods at Cerreto d'Esi, in Italy's Marche region, are expected to come off the line before December. All 170 workers at the Electrolux plant will lose their jobs as production moves to Poland. Across five Italian sites, the Swedish group announced 1,719 layoffs on 11 May, cutting its workforce from 4,500 to about 2,800 (Il Fatto Quotidiano, MarketScreener). A few weeks earlier, it closed its Hungarian plant at Jászberény, with another 600 jobs gone.

The rest of the sector is moving in the same direction. Germany's BSH, the Bosch-Siemens appliance arm, is closing two factories, with 1,400 jobs eliminated by 2028. Turkey's Beko has shut sites in Italy, Poland, and the UK. China's Haier closed the historic Candy plant near Milan. Samsung's Polish output is expected to fall 30% this year. Europe's white goods industry, the factories that make the washing machines, fridges, and ovens in almost every Maltese home, is being hollowed out.

The Cost Gap That Can't Be Closed

The figures Electrolux put before Italy's industry ministry leave little room for political theatre. Factory labour in western Europe costs about €37 per hour. In Turkey, it costs €9. In China and Thailand, €5. Industrial electricity is roughly €204 per megawatt-hour in western Europe, compared with €77 in Turkey. Cold-rolled steel, the sheet metal that becomes a washing-machine drum, costs 31% more in Europe than the Chinese equivalent (Il Fatto Quotidiano). The IEA's wider data point the same way: EU industrial electricity averages roughly twice US levels and nearly 50% above China's.

The market itself is also smaller. European appliance sales fell from 90 million units in 2020 to 83 million in 2025 (Quotidiano.net).

Asian producers have doubled their European market share from 15% to nearly 30% over the past decade. Italian appliance output alone has fallen from 30 million units in 2010 to fewer than 10 million today (Il Foglio). Fewer buyers, cheaper competitors, and higher European input costs leave manufacturers with a calculation that governments can denounce but not easily reverse.

For Malta, this is not an abstract debate about someone else's factories. A small island that imports the goods in its shops feels these shifts through prices, availability, after-sales networks, and the balance of power between European brands and lower-cost producers outside the EU.

Loud Words, Empty Toolbox

Italy's industry minister Adolfo Urso called the Electrolux plan "unacceptable" and demanded that it be withdrawn. Three metalworkers' unions held an eight-hour strike. But Rome has few levers to pull. Golden Power, Italy's foreign-investment screening tool, does not apply because there is no change of ownership. The next ministerial meeting is set for 15 June. Electrolux has not shifted position.

The same pressure is cutting into Germany's industrial core. Gesamtmetall, the metal employers' federation, projects up to 150,000 jobs lost in the metal and electrical sector in 2026 alone. IG Metall, Germany's largest industrial union, calls it "a structural danger for our industrial base".

Brussels has policy instruments, but they are aimed elsewhere. The Clean Industrial Deal, the EU's main competitiveness response, supports upstream sectors such as steel, chemicals, and aluminium. Appliance assembly is not on the list. Germany's new subsidised industrial electricity rate, approved by the Commission in April, is expected to deliver savings of under 10% of total electricity costs. That is not enough when competitors are paying three to four times less for power.

Then there is the EU-Turkey customs union, the trade agreement that allows goods to move tariff-free between the two sides. Turkish-made appliances enter Europe at zero duty, while Turkish factories do not carry the same EU carbon pricing, energy levies, or labour regulation costs. Arçelik, the Turkish group that now controls Beko, can produce at a fraction of EU costs and ship freely into the single market.

Poland, which now accounts for 39% of EU large-appliance production, is still attracting investment. But even there, the advantage is narrowing. Labour costs rose 7.7% year-on-year in late 2025, industrial electricity prices rank among the EU's highest, and Electrolux is already moving service jobs from Kraków to India (Gazeta.pl).

Brussels is spending billions on clean tech and semiconductors. The factories making the appliances inside Europe's homes are slipping out of the continent with far less attention. They are not treated as strategic, and that may be the most revealing part of the story.