Ursus Tractor Factory

URSUS Company was established in the years 1998-2003 as a sequence of restructuring and cooperation of PHZ "Bumar" Ltd., ZPC URSUS SA and "URSUS" Tractor Factory Ltd.The company is still producing URSUS tractors. Bumar Ltd became the main shareholder of URSUS Company. That is why URSUS joined Bumar Industrial Group dealing with URSUS products both on foreign and domestic market.

History

The Ursus Factory was founded in Poland in 1893 on 15 Hay Street by three engineers and four businessmen. It began producing exhaust engines and then later trucks and metal fittings intended for the Russian Tsar. In 1930 the Ursus factory fell on hard times due to the world financial crisis and was nationalized under the Państwowe Zakłady Inżynieryjne (National Engineering Works, PZInż), the Polish manufacturer of arms and vehicles. It then began producing military tractors, tanks and other heavy machinery for troops. During World War II, PZInz was relocated to Germany by the Germans and the remains were destroyed . After the war, the Ursus Factory was rebuilt and started producing copies of German pre-war Lanz Bulldog tractors. During the 1950’s the Ursus factory began producing tractors using a Zetor-based design. By 1961 there was a growing need for tractors in Poland, but the tractors produced by the Ursus factory did not meet the needs of Polish agriculture. A bilateral agreement was created between Poland and Czechoslovakia, where Czechoslovakia would provide the Ursus factory with the parts necessary to enlarge and modernize the factory and in exchange, Poland would supply Czechoslovak factories with raw materials. The goal was to construct a join tractor industry where Poland and Czechoslovakia would combine to produce 120,000 tractors per year, as in 1963 Poland was only producing 15,000.

olidarity

Workers of the Ursus tractor factory played a large role in the solidarity movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s. On June 25, 1976 in response to a rise in food prices, the workers of Ursus, acting in solidarity with workers in Radom and many other areas, went on strike and blocked and destroyed parts of the main east-west and north-south rail lines leaving Warsaw. This was one of the largest and most disruptive of the many strikes that occurred that day, and resulted in the prime minister announcing on television the withdrawal of the food price increase. In 1980, Workers of the Ursus factory went on strike and spent the night at the factory to protest the detention of Jan Narozniak, a volunteer printing worker at the Warsaw chapter of Solidarity. Also in 1980, 16,000 workers threatened to stop coming to work on Saturdays to self enforce the 5 day work week proclaimed by the Solidarity movement. In 1988, 200 workers in the Ursus factory occupied the plant canteen and demanded that the management petition for increased wages, the release of imprisoned workers, and the legalization of Solidarity and the Independent Students’ Association.

Investment under Gierek

The Ursus factory was the focus of an extensive investment initiative in the 1970’s under Edward Gierek. Under this program, large loans were taken from western banks for the purpose of importing modern equipment and methods that would cause expansion of Polish industry and growth of the Polish economy. In 1977 a 7.9 million dollar Export-Import bank loan and a 7 million dollar loan from private American banks were granted to the Ursus tractor factory for the purpose of purchasing machine tools from the Ingersoll Milling Machine Company of Rockford, Illinois, and The Gleason Works in Rochester, New York. However, such investment programs became inefficient and failed, leaving Poland with an immense debt. By 1980, 25 billion dollars were locked into inefficient, unfinished projects in Polish industry that were speculated to require an additional 50 billion dollars to complete. The Ursus Tractor Factory was one of the largest victims of this problem. By 1981, equipment that had been purchased in the West at the Ursus Factory amounted to 3,600 million zloty. Warehouse space at Ursus was filled with unused, unnecessary supplies, such as a stock of 1.6 million rarely used screws, for example, and since production of new warehouse space had stopped, other supplies were left to deteriorate outside. Gierek had invested nearly 1 billion dollars into a project of developing a modern Massey Ferguson model of tractor at Ursus, however due to licensing problems, these tractors could not be sold in the West, and could not be sold in the East because they were too expensive. Instead of the targeted production of 75,000 tractors per year, only 500 were produced.

Ursus today

Ursus’ tractor production declined though the 90’s, falling from 60,000 tractors per year in 1980 to about 16,000 tractors in 1995. The decline in production was due to the enormous debt that Ursus contracted as a result of its expansion program in the 1980’s. The need to repay the debt blocked access to funds needed for the daily operations of the factory. In 1996, 550 million zloty, 80 percent of Ursus’ debt, owed to nearly 700 creditors was written off. Tractor sales continued to decline to an all time low of 1,578 units in 2006.

In 2007, Uzel Holding of Turkey announced they were buying 51% of Ursus. [ [http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=83180 Uzel buys 51 percent of Ursus - Turkish Daily News Sep 12, 2007 ] ] Both Uzel and Ursus are, or were, licensee's of AGCO's Massey Ferguson.

ources:

Open Society Archive- http://files.osa.ceu.hu- http://files.osa.ceu.hu/holdings/300/8/3/text/41-4-120.shtml- http://files.osa.ceu.hu/holdings/300/8/3/text/46-1-243.shtml- http://files.osa.ceu.hu/holdings/300/8/3/text/44-6-190.shtml- http://files.osa.ceu.hu/holdings/300/8/3/text/45-4-220.shtml

The Warsaw Voice- http://warsawvoice.pl- http://www.warsawvoice.pl/archiwum.phtml/2713/Poland Business Network- http://www.polandbusinessnetwork.pl- http://www.polandbusinessnetwork.pl/news/index.php?contentid=140152Time Magazine- http://www.time.comhttp://www.time.com/time/subscriber/personoftheyear/archive/stories/1981.html

External links

* [http://www.ursus.com.pl/en/index_en.html Ursus homepage]
* [http://www.ursusy.pl Polish Ursus webpage]
* [http://www.traktor-power.de/index.php?searchkey=ursus&option=com_seyret&task=searchvideos Ursus video clip collection]

References