Porsche said it will cut 9,000 jobs by 2035, as its parent company, Volkswagen, and its brands undergo restructuring. This amounts to around one in five jobs.
In a deal announced Monday, Porsche management and labour representatives agreed to 5,000 additional job cuts that avoid compulsory redundancies through measures like natural attrition and voluntary schemes. This comes after months of negotiation.
This comes a month after reports revealed that Volkswagen is planning to cut 100,000 jobs and end production at four German plants over the coming years. The cuts would affect about 15% of the company’s workforce. The reported restructuring plan also calls for reducing Volkswagen’s planned investment by about 15%, to just over 130 billion euros ($148.2 billion) over the next five years. It would also end production at plants in Hanover, Zwickau and Emden, as well as Audi’s Neckarsulm site.
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Porsche had already announced 3,900 layoffs in February 2025 according to Reuters. Another 500 were announced by CEO Michael Leiters this year linked to the closure of subsidiaries. Porsche had a workforce of some 42,600 at the end of 2024.
Leiters was made CEO in the beginning of the year, and he was tasked with overhauling the business after sales in Porsche’s once highly lucrative China market collapsed and its EV strategy stalled.
The job cuts roughly correspond to the decline in sales volume, said Daniel Schwarz, automotive analyst at investment bank Metzler. “They are unavoidable in order to reduce costs, because a return to strong growth in China is not expected,” he added.
The Reuters report also mentioned that other German automakers like Mercedes Benz and BMW are also cutting costs as they navigate the shift to electric vehicles in a race with Chinese rivals while also dealing with the effects of tariffs.
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The company and the works council said in a statement that the deal announced by Porsche also includes guarantees to keep sites open for another five years, until the end of 2035, as well as €2.1 billion ($2.39 billion) in investments in its main factory of Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen and its R&D center in Weissach. The announcement came after a meeting of Porsche’s supervisory board last Wednesday, in which the committee gave its approval.
Leiters’ predecessor Oliver Blume remains CEO of Volkswagen, having ended a dual leadership role that was opposed by many investors. Blume is also pushing for a doubling of job cuts across the Volkswagen group to 100,000, measures that he says are necessary to remain competitive as more Chinese brands come to Europe. He also warned that four of the group’s factories, including one belonging to premium brand Audi, are threatened with closure after 2030.