Vaillant transforms Vitoria plant from factory closure to R&D hub with 131 engineers

Gorka Barañano sits in the headquarters of Vaillant's Spanish operations in Vitoria, a city in Spain's Basque Country, and speaks with the clarity of someone who has lived through an industrial resurrection. The German multinational, which also owns the heating brand Saunier Duval, closed its manufacturing plant here years ago—a wound that left the region scarred. But the company did not abandon Vitoria. Instead, it transformed the facility into something entirely different: a research and development center that has become the group's flagship hub for heat pump innovation. Where once there were 70 workers on a factory floor, there are now 131 engineers designing the technologies that will heat European homes without burning fossil fuels.

"The future is much clearer now than it was then, when manufacturing itself was in question," Barañano says. He does not minimize what came before. "There was real suffering," he acknowledges. But he frames what followed as a "tremendous achievement"—the reversal of what looked like terminal decline. The company has continued to expand its technical staff in Vitoria. A heat pump developed entirely in the region sits on display, a tangible symbol of the pivot from factory to innovation center. "Vitoria is growing as a development hub," he explains. "We keep adding people. The prospects are good because we're proving this is a place with real knowledge."

The work matters because the stakes are high. Vaillant has committed itself to replacing gas boilers with aerothermal and geothermal systems—machines that extract energy from the earth or air to heat homes without combusting fossil fuels. With government subsidies, the investment can pay for itself in five years. It is a business with genuine social benefit. Yet adoption is moving far slower than the company expected. Vaillant built a manufacturing plant in Slovakia with capacity to produce roughly one million units annually. That plant currently operates at about 20 percent of capacity. Market demand has not materialized as forecasted.

Barañano identifies several obstacles. There is the challenge of educating consumers about the technology itself. There are government incentives—a recent Spanish regulation now allows property tax breaks for those who install heat pumps—but these policies remain inconsistent across regions. But the deepest problem, as he describes it, is what he calls a "market confabulation." When a homeowner's boiler breaks in winter, they want it replaced immediately. An aerothermal system costs between 15,000 and 20,000 euros. A gas boiler costs 2,500 euros. A person with no heat, children in the house, and forty-eight hours to decide cannot easily justify the larger expense, even if subsidies exist—subsidies that may take a year to arrive. "You have to put the money up yourself, and it terrifies you," Barañano says. The user hesitates. Then the installer hesitates: why complicate the sale with a heat pump when a boiler is already sold? "That's why I call it a confabulation," he says. "We manufacturers have to do our part to break it."

Barañano also addresses a separate crisis: absenteeism in Vaillant's technical services division runs at about 8 percent—a rate he finds troubling. He does not blame workers for taking necessary sick leave, but he points to a broader social attitude that treats absence as consequence-free. "There's a social consciousness that minimizes absenteeism," he observes. He calls for employers, workers, politicians, and doctors to collectively address the rising rate of temporary disability claims. The question is not whether illness exists, but how it is managed—how workers communicate, how companies coordinate, how the impact is minimized rather than extended.

A separate challenge has emerged in Vitoria's low-emission zones, where combustion vehicles cannot enter. Installers have complained that repair work in these neighborhoods has become prohibitively expensive. Many of Vaillant's technicians now cycle to jobs, but bicycles are not a universal solution. "It gets harder and harder, and the service gets more expensive," Barañano notes. He shifts focus to what he sees as the real issue: the mental health and stress of the technicians themselves. "Nobody thinks about these people," he says. "It's important that the city be pleasant, but people also have to be able to work. Institutions could make things much easier for these professionals."

Barañano's schedule is so compressed that securing an hour of his time took a month. He oversees roughly 2,000 employees across Spain and 50 technical service centers, and he makes a point of visiting them, listening to their problems. It requires many hours on airplanes. At home, his priorities are simpler: his wife and his two adult children, now 19 and 21. With his lifelong friend group—some friendships dating to age four or five—he is just another member of the crew, cracking jokes on WhatsApp, attending concerts together, eating and dancing. Yet even there, he carries a different weight. "I'm probably the responsible one, the one who went the straight path," he says. He lost his father at six years old. That loss shaped him into someone who watches over others, who does not want to disappoint. It has also burdened him with a perfectionism he has had to learn to release. "You're not perfect and you don't have to be," he reflects. "Nobody asks it of you, and you shouldn't ask it of yourself. It's destructive and even self-centered."