Volkswagen has finally said the number out loud. In an internal memo to staff, CEO Oliver Blume flagged roughly 50,000 additional job cuts on top of the 50,000 already agreed across the group—effectively confirming, for the first time, that Europe’s biggest car maker is looking at reducing up to 100,000 positions worldwide. The memo was seen by Reuters, which reported its contents on July 13. Until now, Volkswagen had refused to comment on reports of a cut that size.The trigger, according to Blume, is a cost gap the company can no longer explain away. Volkswagen has calculated a cost disadvantage of about 20% versus comparable rivals. Translate that into headcount and you get what the memo calls a “theoretical deduction” of another 50,000 jobs globally. “We are currently assessing across all brands, companies and regions how many adjustments are actually necessary and feasible,” Blume wrote.
Why Volkswagen is 100,000 cutting jobs: tariffs, China and a 20% cost gap
Blume is trying to fix a company that is bleeding on several fronts at once. Profits have slumped under billions of euros in tariff costs. Competition in China—once Volkswagen’s most reliable profit engine—has turned brutal, with BYD and Geely pushing VW down the sales table. And the German manufacturing network, the emotional core of the brand, is simply not efficient enough. The 50,000 cuts already agreed span the group, including Porsche and Audi.
The four German plants Volkswagen cannot find a use for
The memo does not spare the factories. “As of today, we still cannot confirm competitive use cases for the plants of Emden, Hanover, Zwickau and Neckarsulm in the 2030s,” Blume said. He added that he prefers “intelligent solutions” to outright closures, having earlier floated ideas like defence-industry work or building Chinese-designed Volkswagen models in Europe at underused sites.That framing matters, because closing those plants is not a decision Blume can make alone. Sources told Reuters that labour representatives on the supervisory board blocked the restructuring proposals when Blume presented them last Thursday—proposals that reportedly included the job cuts and the four closures.
What Volkswagen said publicly, and what it kept in the memo
Volkswagen’s official statement after Thursday’s board meeting said nothing about job cuts or plant closures. What it announced instead was a plan to gradually halve its model line-up and cut production capacity to nine million vehicles a year, down from a pre-pandemic target of 12 million. Analysts were unimpressed, calling the measures short of what Volkswagen’s problems actually demand. The numbers workers wanted—100,000 jobs, four plants—only surfaced in the internal memo.The memo appears to be a response to that silence. Workers had staged protests at 18 sites, organised by IG Metall, demanding management explain itself. Blume’s note reads like a man buying time. “Of course, it’s understandable that not everything has been planned out down to the last detail yet, and that certain issues still need to be further discussed and evaluated,” he wrote, promising “more meetings in which we will work hard to find the best solutions.“For the roughly 650,000 people Volkswagen employs, that is not much of an answer yet.
