Fifty thousand jobs. That’s the number Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume put on the table with the kind of bluntness you don’t expect from the man running Germany’s most iconic industrial empire. Building, developing, and exporting vehicles from Germany, he told Bild am Sonntag, is no longer sustainable. A sentence that, coming from the head of Volkswagen Group, hits like a white flag stitched together with spreadsheets.
The restructuring plan targets 50,000 positions eliminated by 2030, and the headcount doesn’t stop at the Volkswagen badge. Audi is in the mix. Porsche too. And Cariad, the software subsidiary that was supposed to be the group’s golden ticket to the digital future, gets its share of the axe as well.
Blume points to high labor costs, soaring energy prices, and what he diplomatically calls “excessive European regulations” as the structural causes of the crisis. What he points to less eagerly is the Dieselgate scandal, which spent years quietly torching the group’s credibility and cash reserves like a slow-burning fuse nobody wanted to cut.
In 2025, deliveries dropped 6% in China and 12% in the United States. Revenue flatlined at €322 billion across 9 million vehicles delivered. Net profit took a historic hit, squeezed simultaneously by collapsing demand in China, historically the group’s most profitable market, and by American tariffs with no expiration date in sight. Even Porsche, the jewel of the portfolio, had to quietly walk back its electrification ambitions after EV demand refused to read the optimistic forecasts it had been handed.
The most pessimistic scenario identifies up to eight German plants at risk of closure due to overcapacity. Eight. That’s not restructuring as a business strategy. That’s restructuring as a synonym for dismantling.
The expected operating margin for this year hovers around 4%. For a €322 billion company, that’s not a target, it’s an emergency room reading. Three German plants have already cut production costs by 20% in the past year, a result Blume has presented as evidence the plan is working. But trimming fat and building muscle are not the same exercise.
