Audi will reduce 7500 jobs in the next four years. In return, the employment securing, which excludes operational dismissals, is extended by four years to 2033. The company announced this at the first works meeting of the year in Ingolstadt. The works council under the chairman Jörg Schlagbauer on Monday, under the chairman Jörg Schlagbauer, emphasized that around 8,000 employees in Hall B and the Ingolstadt outskirts: “We were able to ward off many demands of the company, but also had to make compromises to enable financial scope for additional investments.” Appeared workplace reduction only affects the so -called indirect area, i.e. all jobs outside of production. The headquarters should be particularly hard affected. Here, a number of engineers should go into technical development with the help of a severance payment program. A total of 87,000 people work for the car manufacturer, including 55,000 locations in Germany. A job guarantee until 2029 has been in place for them. “List of horror” A surprise was no longer the bad news for the Audians. Already in December it became known that the Audi board had activated the “bad weather clause” of the Pact “Audi future” agreed between employers and employees in 2019. Audi boss Gernot Döllner had made it clear that the group wanted to tax a harder austerity course than before. With the works council, the first exploratory talks have been going on since November. The IG Metall alarm then suggested the management to want to implement a “list of horror” at Audi. These measures included lowering the tariff wage and the loss of surcharges for night shifts as well as the outsourcing of employees in production, logistics and administration, which only affect 1600 jobs. The Audi works council then terminated hard resistance. The works council’s demand that an additional car model will be manufactured at the Ingolstadt headquarters to utilize the work. Without such a concrete promise, the employee representatives did not want to conclude a new fundamental agreement with the company. In the future, Ingolstadt will produce the Audi Q3 from the group network. So far, the second generation of the compact off-road vehicle in the Audi plant in Hungary has been off. Since the Audi plant in Neckarsulm is also poorly utilized, discussions in the VW group have started, which model is suitable for production at the location. Audi wants to invest a total of up to eight billion euros in the German locations, a large part of it in the highly automated production. In addition, a so -called future fund for new technologies of over 250 million euros is to be set up for Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm. 6000 jobs are to be dropped by 2027. With the tightened cost reduction program, Audi boss Döllner wants to save one billion euros in the personnel annually. The former Porsche manager is concerned with making Audi more profitable again. The brand with the four rings should become slimmer and more efficient. In the last quarters, the profit margin was well below 5 percent. In the summer of 2023, Döllner was sent to Ingolstadt by VW CEO Oliver Blume to lift the return step by step at the level of a “premium brand”. Audi should reach double -digit margins by the end of the decade, it said at the time, and the medium -term margin destination should be 13 percent. Audi has not only got into trouble because of the weak demand at the large car market in China. In recent years, several new models have come onto the market late due to persistent software difficulties. In the past financial year, the company sold only 1.67 million vehicles, a minus of twelve percent, and even fell behind the American electropionier Tesla. The sales figures for the electrical Audi models also declined, although the market for electric cars are growing globally. All German car companies are currently suffering from falling sales figures and returns, but Audi has hit it particularly hard compared to the rival Mercedes and BMW. The Audi mother company Volkswagen had countermeased a few months ago. There, the board terminated the actually applicable employment guarantee and enforced salary cuts and the gradual reduction of 35,000 jobs by 2030. The employee side was able to prevent the initially threatened work closings. The work in Brussels was only closed at the end of February. There the recently little requested electric SUV Q8 E-Ttron was manufactured.
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