Ursus Factory

Last updated
Ursus S.A.
Public
Industry Automotive industry
Founded1893 (Ursus)
1946 (POL-MOT Warfama)
Headquarters Lublin, Poland
Area served
Worldwide
ProductsTractors, Buses
Number of employees
794 (2016) [1]
Website www.ursus.com.pl
Ursus 5044 tractor at International Defence Industry Exhibition 2013 in Kielce Ursus5044 DSC01726.JPG
Ursus 5044 tractor at International Defence Industry Exhibition 2013 in Kielce

The Ursus Factory is a Polish producer of agricultural machinery located in Lublin. In the 2010s, it has also carried out some production of trolleybuses in a joint venture with the Ukrainian manufacturer Bogdan.

Poland Republic in Central Europe

Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country located in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative subdivisions, covering an area of 312,696 square kilometres (120,733 sq mi), and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With a population of approximately 38.5 million people, Poland is the sixth most populous member state of the European Union. Poland's capital and largest metropolis is Warsaw. Other major cities include Kraków, Łódź, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk, and Szczecin.

Lublin City in Lublin Voivodeship, Poland

Lublin is the ninth-largest city in Poland and the second-largest city of Lesser Poland. It is the capital and the center of Lublin Voivodeship (province) with a population of 339,682. Lublin is the largest Polish city east of the Vistula River and is about 170 km (106 mi) to the southeast of Warsaw by road.

Trolleybus electric bus reliant on overhead wires

A trolleybus is an electric bus that draws power from overhead wires using spring-loaded trolley poles. Two wires and poles are required to complete the electrical circuit. This differs from a tram or streetcar, which normally uses the track as the return path, needing only one wire and one pole. They are also distinct from other kinds of electric buses, which usually rely on batteries. Power is most commonly supplied as 600-volt direct current, but there are exceptions.

Contents

History

Early history

Ursus advertisement from 1914 Lokomobila benzynowa d.png
Ursus advertisement from 1914
Post-war Ursus C-45 Ursus tractor.jpg
Post-war Ursus C-45

The Ursus Factory was founded in Poland in 1893 on 15 Sienna Street, Warsaw, by three engineers and four businessmen. It began producing exhaust engines and then later trucks and metal fittings intended for the Russian Tsar.

Russia transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia

Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres (6,612,100 sq mi), Russia is by a considerable margin the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with about 146.79 million people as of 2019, including Crimea. About 77% of the population live in the western, European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is one of the largest cities in the world and the second largest city in Europe; other major cities include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.

Tsar title given to a male monarch in Russia, Bulgaria and Serbia

Tsar, also spelled csar, or tzar or czar, is a title used to designate East and South Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers of Eastern Europe, originally Bulgarian monarchs from 10th century onwards. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, or Tsarism. The term is derived from the Latin word Caesar, which was intended to mean "Emperor" in the European medieval sense of the term—a ruler with the same rank as a Roman emperor, holding it by the approval of another emperor or a supreme ecclesiastical official —but was usually considered by western Europeans to be equivalent to king, or to be somewhat in between a royal and imperial rank.

In 1930, the Ursus factory fell on hard times due to the world financial crisis and was nationalised 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 the German occupation of Poland in World War II the factory was controlled by FAMO and produced Panzer II, Marder II and Wespe AFVs. After the war, the Ursus Factory started producing the Ursus C-45, a copy of the German pre-war Lanz Bulldog tractor. During the 1950s, the Ursus factory began producing tractors using a Zetor-based design.

World War II 1939–1945 global war

World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 70 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.

FAMO automobile manufacturer

FAMO, short for Fahrzeug- und Motoren-Werke was a German vehicle manufacturer in the early 20th century.

Panzer II 1936 light tank family

The Panzer II is the common name used for a family of German tanks used in World War II. The official German designation was Panzerkampfwagen II.

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 modernise the factory and in exchange, Poland would supply Czechoslovak factories with raw materials. The goal was to construct a joint tractor industry where Poland and Czechoslovakia would combine to produce 120,000 tractors per year, as in 1963 Poland was only producing 15,000.

Czechoslovakia 1918–1992 country in Central Europe, predecessor of the Czech Republic and Slovakia

Czechoslovakia, or Czecho-Slovakia, was a sovereign state in Central Europe that existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until its peaceful dissolution into the Czech Republic and Slovakia on 1 January 1993.

Solidarity

Workers of the Ursus tractor factory played a large role in the solidarity movement in the 1970s and 1980s. On 25 June 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 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 in order 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 legalisation of Solidarity and the Independent Students' Association.

Solidarity (Polish trade union) 20th-century Polish trade union federation

Solidarity is a Polish labour union that was founded on 17 September 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. It was the first trade union in a Warsaw Pact country that was not controlled by a communist party. Its membership peaked at 10 million members at its September 1981 Congress, which constituted one third of the total working-age population of Poland.

Investment under Gierek

The Ursus factory was the focus of an extensive investment initiative in the 1970s under Edward Gierek. Under this programme, 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 Gleason Works in Rochester, New York. However, such investment programmes 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 złoty. Warehouse space at Ursus was filled with unused, unnecessary supplies, e.g. a stock of 1.6 million rarely used screws, and since construction 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 Western Bloc during the Cold War for political reasons, and in the Eastern Bloc neither because they were too expensive. Instead of the targeted production of 75,000 tractors per year, only 500 were made.

Ursus today

Ursus 1224 U1224.jpg
Ursus 1224
Ursus 8014H Ursus 8014h.jpg
Ursus 8014H
Ursus C-3110 HL at Agritechnica 2017 fairs Ursus C-3110 HL Agritechnica 2017 - Front and left side.jpg
Ursus C-3110 HL at Agritechnica 2017 fairs

Ursus' tractor production declined throughout the 1990s, 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 had contracted as a result of its expansion programme in the 1980s. The need to repay the debt blocked access to funds needed for the daily operations of the factory. In 1996, 550 million złoty, 80% 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.

URSUS Company was established in the years 1998–2003 as a consequence 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, leading to Ursus becoming part of Bumar Industrial Group, which is marketing Ursus products both on foreign and domestic markets.

In 2007, Uzel Holding of Turkey announced they were buying 51% of Ursus. [2] Both Uzel and Ursus are, or were, licensees of AGCO's Massey Ferguson. In 2008 it was announced that Uzel had not kept up to its commitments, and TAFE and Pol-Mot were interested in buying. [3] [4]

In 2011 Pol-Mot bought the Ursus Company from Bumar Ltd. [5] Recently, the company is expanding its business in Central Europe and other countries, as well as planning to produce electric buses. [6]

Ursus City Smile URSUS Hydrogen Bus IAA 2016 (1) Travelarz.JPG
Ursus City Smile

In 2013, a joint venture between Ursus and the Ukrainian company Bogdan received an order for 38 trolleybuses for the Lublin, Poland, trolleybus system. [7] The body-and-chassis shells were completed by Bogdan and shipped to an Ursus plant in Lublin, where Ursus would install the axles, electrical propulsion equipment (supplied by Cegelec), seats and other fittings, to complete the vehicles. [7] The first of the 38 Urbus/Bogdan trolleybuses, officially designated as model Ursus T70116, was delivered in mid-2013, [8] and the last were delivered in mid-2015. [9]

Ursus signed an agreement worth USD 10 million in 2014 to deliver 3000 tractors to Ethiopia [10] [11]

Models

Prototypes

See also

Related Research Articles

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Ursus C-45

The Ursus C-45 and C-451 was a popular Polish model of tractor. It was manufactured from 1947 to 1959 by the Ursus Factory in Warsaw, and from 1960 to 1965 by Zakłady Mechaniczne in Gorzów Wielkopolski.

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References

  1. ↑ money.pl - o firmie
  2. ↑ Uzel buys 51 percent of Ursus Archived 2007-09-17 at the Wayback Machine , Turkish Daily News , September 12, 2007.
  3. ↑ "Tractors and Farm Equipment Limited: Private Company Information - Businessweek". Businessweek.com.
  4. ↑ "Pol-Mot wants to buy Ursus tractor producer again". pb.pl. Archived from the original on 2010-08-13. Retrieved 2009-03-12.
  5. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2013-11-04. Retrieved 2013-11-03.CS1 maint: Archived copy as title (link)
  6. ↑ "Ursus. Od traktorów do elektrycznych autobusów". interia.pl. 7 May 2014.
  7. 1 2 Trolleybus Magazine No. 310 (July–August 2013), p. 106. UK: National Trolleybus Association. ISSN 0266-7452.
  8. ↑ Trolleybus Magazine No. 312 (November–December 2013), p. 164.
  9. ↑ Trolleybus Magazine No. 324 (November–December 2015), p. 180.
  10. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2014-05-08. Retrieved 2014-05-07.CS1 maint: Archived copy as title (link)
  11. ↑ "allAfrica.com: Ethiopia: Polish Billionaire Shows Interest in Ethiopia". allAfrica.com.

Sources

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