Automotive supplier Valeo plans to cut between 900 and 1,200 jobs in France

The automotive supplier Valeo plans to cut 868 positions on eight of its French sites, the group’s management said on Wednesday without specifying the deadline.

Valeo management announced to employees 694 forced departures and 174 voluntary departures, according to a group spokesperson.

Two sites closed

The sites of La Suze-sur-Sarthe (Sarthe) and La Verrière (Yvelines) will be closed. Most of their employees will be offered positions at other nearby Valeo sites. The L’Isle-d’Abeau (Isère) site will not close, but will reduce its workforce, with 70 employees instead of 308 so far. This factory which produced starters was gradually converted to hybridization systems (an electric motor with its electronic system).

The sites of Sainte-Florine (Haute-Loire), Reims (Marne), Laval (Mayenne), Amiens (Somme) and Limoges (Haute-Vienne) are also concerned. In addition, 200 positions could be cut in Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland.

“Dramatic announcement”

This announcement is “a project” for which “the timetable and modalities will be discussed subsequently,” said the group’s spokesperson. “We worked to have a plan that protects production operators”, who are not affected by forced departures, he underlined. These job cuts are “generally linked to the slowdown [du marché automobile] European and French in particular,” he underlined. “The production [automobile] French has declined significantly over the last ten years, we had not made any adjustment. There comes a time when you have to do it.”

“It’s a dramatic announcement,” reacted Bertrand Bellanger, from FO. “Reducing costs may be necessary, but sacrificing jobs and weakening the future of the sector in France is a strategic error,” he judged. “The electrification of the automobile represents a major turning point for the sector. But it must not be to the detriment of employees,” he said.

The Valeo group had already announced in January that it was considering cutting 1,150 positions worldwide, including 235 in France, mainly in management positions, out of 109,900 employees worldwide.

Valeo is yet another giant in the automotive sector to suffer from the slowdown in the European automobile market and to announce job cuts, after Michelin, Ford and Bosch.

Specializing in electronic and lighting systems, the equipment manufacturer is also suffering from slipping electrification, with “a lot of postponements of launches of new productions among manufacturers”, explained its general director Christophe Périllat at the end of October. Valeo then revised its turnover target for 2024 slightly downward (-3.2%), to 21.3 billion euros.

Automotive equipment manufacturers could also suffer from the arrival of Chinese competitors, while surcharges on Chinese electric cars protect European manufacturers but not equipment manufacturers, Périllat pointed out in mid-October in an interview with AFP.

Furthermore, Valeo has numerous sites in China which produce for local automobile factories, compared to which Europe has lost “25% of its competitiveness in four years”, in particular because of the inflation of wages and manufacturing costs. energy, according to the general director.