Aminvest has taken over six companies from GCK, while GCK Performance has been acquired by another consortium, in a partial rescue that preserves around 140 jobs. The deal marks a lifeline for part of the French industrial group, but it also underscores how difficult the hydrogen sector remains to commercialize.
The transaction comes against a backdrop of structural weakness in GCK’s retrofit business. Converting existing vehicles and equipment to alternative powertrains requires heavy engineering work and costly certification processes, making margins hard to sustain. Those economics have been further undermined by the still-nascent hydrogen market, which has yet to reach the scale needed to support broad deployment.
In other words, the rescue is only partial: it protects employment and keeps some of GCK’s activities alive, but it does not resolve the deeper issue that hydrogen retrofitting remains trapped between high development costs and insufficient demand.