Now BMW too: Bavaria is cutting 8,000 jobs

How this should work has been negotiated by the board of directors and the works council. The new BMW boss Milan Nedeljković and the works council chairman Martin Kimmich presented the agreement in the morning at a works meeting at the headquarters in Munich, reports South German newspaper.

Accordingly, BMW should have a total of around Cut 8,000 jobs. That would correspond to loud SZ more than every eleventh place in Germany.

The headquarters in Munich are said to be particularly affected: a particularly large number of employees there work in administration, i.e. in positions away from the factory halls.

As the SZ reported, a severance payment program was agreed for all German locations.

The approximately 40,000 employees in Germany will soon be contacted and presented with a severance payment offer. That would be almost half of the approximately 84,000 BMW employees in Germany.

The Bavarians also produce in Austria in a factory in Steyr and also have Austrian automotive suppliers.

BMW shares, which are listed in the DAX, initially barely reacted to the news. There has been speculation since mid-June that BMW is about to embark on a job cuts program. At that time, Milan Nedeljkovic, who had been promoted from production director to CEO just a month earlier, had to give a clear profit warning. At the time it was also said that the group would “intensify and accelerate ongoing cost reductions through further structural and efficiency measures”.

The deep crisis facing German car manufacturers

Last had VWEurope’s largest car manufacturer, announced massive job cuts. 50,000 jobs will be lost.

For a long time, BMW was the last major German car manufacturer to get by without a major job cuts program. Volkswagen, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche – all of them announced job cuts last year – some on a much larger scale.

And the VW Group is already fighting for the second round of cuts – with numbers running into the tens of thousands. Just this week, the Porsche subsidiary made a start by eliminating another 5,000 jobs. And the big suppliers are also downsizing.

Manufacturers in crisis mode

The entire German auto industry is currently suffering from the collapse of the Chinese market and the sharp increase in competition and price pressure there. Added to this are US tariffs, increasing Chinese competition on the global market and, most recently, the effects of the crisis in the Middle East on the global economy.

BMW can’t escape this either, even if the Munich-based company has mostly gotten off a bit more lightly recently than its German competitors. And there is another reason given in corporate circles for the severance payment program: BMW spent a lot of money on the development of the New Class in order to create a technological leap. The group had already emphasized last year that development costs should then fall again. And that apparently also includes staff.