Several hundred workers gathered on Nuremberg’s Siemensbrücke, a bridge named after the engineering company, and at its dynamo plant in Siemensstadt in the German capital during the annual shareholders’ meeting, the IG Metall trade union reported.

“Given the ecological challenges that we face today we need alternatives to drive technologies,” IG Metall official Regina Katerndahl said.

“We can and should develop these here and link them up to digitalization, and for this reason, splitting off and possibly selling the dynamo plant makes no sense,” Katerndahl added.

Roland Wehrer, an IG Metall official in Nuremberg said Siemens was playing with fire in Nuremberg. “A well functioning factory is to be chopped up arbitrarily into little pieces,” he said.

This would jeopardize not only LDA, but other parts of the Nuremberg site, Wehrer said.

In October, Siemens announced it planned to set up an independent legal basis for LDA, which has its headquarters in Nuremberg and manufactures large motors for the mining, chemicals and fossil fuels sectors.

The unit has a staff complement of around 2,200 in Nuremberg and Berlin, and a further 4,800 in the Czech Republic, the United States and China.