HANOVER, Germany — Continental A.G. has broken ground on its new corporate headquarters in Hanover, which the company expects to be in operation by year-end 2020 with room for up to 1,250 employees initially.
Work on the facility will continue into 2021 to make room for 350 more employees, in time for the company's 150th anniversary, Conti said.
The new headquarters will will house corporate functions like information technology, human relations, finance, legal and communications but not executives from individual business units.
Conti's ContiTech non-tire rubber products businesses, for example, will not move to new facility, staying instead at the current headquarters in north-central Hanover, which is adjacent to a ContiTech factory.
Conti said it is still evaluating several options for its tire division executive team, which also are housed at the current headquarters.
The new Continental campus will consist of eight buildings on two separate plots of land which will be connected to each other by four bridges. The longest of these — at nearly 235 feet — will extend over Hans-Böckler-Allee, a four-lane east-west thoroughfare with street-car tracks dividing the traffic lanes.
Conti said the project involves an investment of more than $120 million. Conti did not disclose the scale of support it's receiving from the city of Hanover and/or the state of Lower Saxony. The plots cover a combined area of nearly 400,000 square feet; the building will offer nearly 520,000 square feet of office space.
"Continental has been enjoying rapid, profitable growth for many years," Continental CEO Elmar Degenhart said, noting the current headquarters is too small to accommodate the nearly 900 employees housed there.
