German automotive giant Volkswagen is reportedly drawing up plans for a drastic overhaul that could see 100,000 jobs eliminated in the coming years – double its previously announced targets.
Senior executives are said to be considering this dramatic workforce reduction to achieve €11 billion (£9.5 billion) in cost savings by 2030, according to local media.
The proposals include placing four of the company’s car manufacturing plants in Germany under review, with the potential for production to cease, Manager Magazin reported.
This would represent a monumental restructuring for the 89-year-old Wolfsburg-based carmaker, owner of brands such as Audi, Bentley, Skoda, and Seat.
The scale of these proposed cuts significantly exceeds earlier plans to reduce 50,000 jobs across its German operations by 2030.
At the time, chief executive Oliver Blume told shareholders that the company was on track to make savings of more than six billion euro (£5.2 billion) by 2030.
He has said that some 28,000 agreements for staff to leave by 2030 had already been made, which relates to those at the Germany headquarters,
“The transformation of the entire company is continuing to pick up speed,” the boss had said.
“With these programmes we are methodically addressing all cost categories across all brands.”
He also said the group was working to “address the reduction of overcapacities in our production network” by bringing down global targets from 12 million vehicles to nine million.
It comes after reporting that vehicle deliveries had dropped by 10% in the US and 8% in China in 2025.
It said this was because of “challenging market conditions” including tariffs on US imports and increased competition in China where big electric carmakers like BYD have been taking huge shares of the market.
Despite this, deliveries rose by 4.5% in Europe to almost four million vehicles.
Volkswagen reportedly has around 625,000 staff around the world, meaning its job-cutting plans would shed about 16% of the total workforce if they went ahead.
Reports said that details of the new plan were set to be presented to the company’s supervisory board on July 9.
A spokeswoman for Volkswagen said it was not commenting on the speculation.