Armin Weigel / DPA
Audi vehicles in front of the headquarters in Ingolstadt: The car maker will cut around 9500 jobs by 2025, but 2000 new jobs will be created in return
Audi is under pressure. Now the company agrees with its works council on a far-reaching package, reducing thousands of jobs including. The automaker expects savings of billions of euros from this.
The carmaker Audi Show stock market chart wants to liberate itself with a massive job cuts and further austerity measures from the crisis. By 2025, the VW subsidiary is building 9500 jobs at the German sites, in return for up to 2000 jobs in areas such as electromobility and digitization emerge new. This is the result of an agreement between the company and the works council, the company said on Tuesday. Audi currently has around 61,000 employees in Germany.
The job cuts should be socially acceptable and without operational redundancies, it said. The employment guarantee for the remaining Audi employees at the Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm plants will be extended from 2025 to the end of 2029. The chairman of the works council Peter Mosch praised the agreement as an important milestone and emphasized: “The jobs of the permanent staff are safe!”
Audi and the works council had long been negotiating the future pact for the pressurized company. The company hopes the measures will save a total of six billion euros by 2029.
Of the future Audi CEO Markus Duesmann should make the carmaker more profitable again, closer to Porsche Show stock market chart and Volkswagen Show stock market chart work together and bring to 2025 also 30 E-models on the market.
Capacities of the plants are adjusted downwards
However, the current package was still under the aegis of outgoing CEO Bram Schot. “Both sides have proven that the focus is on the responsibility for the future of the four rings and their employees,” said the still-Audi boss to agree with the works council. “In times of upheaval, we are making Audi more agile and efficient, increasing productivity and strengthening the competitiveness of our German locations in the long term.”
The capacities of the German locations will be adjusted downwards as part of the agreement. In Neckarsulm, it will in future amount to 225,000 vehicles per year, in Ingolstadt 450,000. Last year, 186,000 or 491,000 vehicles had been produced at the two plants, but capacities were higher. In Neckarsulm she should actually be around 300,000. The plant has been suffering from underutilization for some time. Ingolstadt has already built more than 530,000 cars in the past. The lack of utilization of the works was recently criticized by the parent company in Wolfsburg.
If profits increase, employee participation does not automatically increase
Even with the remaining employees, the current agreement in the future in the purse can make noticeable. It is true that profit sharing is set to remain at the level of previous years, even though the operating result also remains the same, as Audi announced. However, with significantly higher results, it will only be necessary to negotiate in the future whether participation will increase accordingly. For the past year, a typical Audi production employee has received around € 3,600 in profit sharing. In the past, however, the company had already paid significantly higher sums.
Audi has been struggling with numerous problems since 2015
Audi has been on the decline since the disclosure of the diesel scandal in 2015 and clearly behind its competitors Daimler Show stock market chart and BMW Show stock market chart fallen behind. Of the scandal cost billions. Audi has had six development bosses over the past seven years and the cars are selling tough. It was only at the end of October that the company had to lower the sales forecast for the current year.
In addition to the homemade problems from the diesel scandal, Audi suffers from the general weakness of the auto industry. The transition to electromobility costs corporations billions, plus new mobility concepts and the challenges of digitization and autonomous driving. At the same time, worldwide car sales are weakening, which affects suppliers as well as manufacturers. For example, at Continental Show stock market chart By 2023 around 15,000 jobs will be affected by “changes”.
Audis group mother Volkswagen is already further in the matter of the future pact. There too, a corresponding agreement was long disputed between employee representation and management, works council chief Bernd Osterloh was initially violently together with today’s corporate and former brand manager Herbert Diess together.
In the fall of 2016, however, the group decided that initially up to 30,000 jobs should be eliminated for the core brand VW Passenger Cars over the next few years, of which 23,000 in Germany and many in the administration. On the other hand, thousands of new jobs are to be created in future areas such as networking and mobile services.
By Christof Rühmair, dpa