Volkswagen's chief executive Oliver Blume is preparing to cut up to 100,000 jobs worldwide and shut four German production sites, Germany's Manager Magazin reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. If carried out, the plan would represent the deepest restructuring in the automaker's 89-year history — stripping away roughly one in every seven workers from a group that currently employs around 657,000 people across brands including Audi, Porsche, Skoda and SEAT.
The report says Blume presented the plan to Volkswagen's management board earlier this week. It would double a target announced only months ago to cut around 50,000 positions by 2030 — a round of reductions already regarded at the time as historically significant. Volkswagen declined to comment on what it called confidential documents, but stopped short of denying the figures, noting only that decisions would be taken through the company's proper governing bodies.
“"The entire Group — including its brands and subsidiaries — must undergo far-reaching change." — Volkswagen spokesperson”
Four plants on the chopping block
According to Manager Magazin, production would be wound down at VW's plants in Hanover, Zwickau and Emden, and at Audi's facility in Neckarsulm in Baden-Württemberg. The closures would happen gradually, as the vehicle models currently built at those sites reach the end of their life cycles, rather than through immediate shutdowns. What remains legally unclear is how cuts of this scale could be implemented: in late 2024, Volkswagen struck a deal with unions that explicitly rules out compulsory redundancies and plant closures in Germany until the end of 2030.
Volkswagen's General Works Council and Germany's powerful industrial union IG Metall responded swiftly. In a joint statement on Friday, the two bodies said they would resist any such measures with full force — a significant obstacle in a country where worker representatives hold legally guaranteed seats on company supervisory boards, giving them direct influence over major corporate decisions.
A crisis years in the making
The reported plan reflects pressures that have been building across the European automotive sector for several years. Volkswagen's net profit fell 28% in the first quarter of 2026 to €1.56 billion, while revenue slipped 2% to €75.7 billion. US tariffs are adding roughly €4 billion annually to the group's costs, according to CFO Arno Antlitz, who warned earlier this year that existing savings plans were insufficient to secure the company's future.
“"If we fail to do this, we are putting our future at risk." — CFO Arno Antlitz, earlier in 2026”
Beyond headcount, Blume and Antlitz are reportedly planning to reduce the group's five-year investment budget by around 15%, bringing it to just over €130 billion. They also want to spin off both the core VW brand and the group's components manufacturing arm into separate, independently structured companies — a move that could eventually allow Volkswagen to list individual businesses on public capital markets. The group's own spokesperson acknowledged that its existing business model, developing cars in Germany, producing them in Europe and exporting globally, "no longer works across all brands".
Volkswagen's stock has fallen more than 25% this year and the company faces intensifying competition from lower-cost Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers in Europe and globally. The reported restructuring plan has not been formally approved, and the path to implementation — through union negotiations, works council approvals and Germany's co-determination laws — is likely to be long and contested. For the hundreds of thousands of workers and the communities built around VW's German factories, the coming months will be defining.
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