Frankfurt (dpa) – Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess has made it clear that he expects job cuts at the carmaker’s headquarters in the coming years amid the debate over the future of the main factory in the northern German city of Wolfsburg.
“We need more speed in the development of new vehicles and in decision-making,” Diess said on Thursday.
He referred to the competition from the factory of the US electric car manufacturer Tesla on the outskirts of Berlin.
“That is the challenge Wolfsburg is facing,” he said. The plant must become more productive, Diess added.
“We will certainly need to cut jobs to achieve this,” the VW boss stated, referring to jobs in production as well as in management and development.
In recent weeks, there has been speculation over a reduction of about 30,000 jobs in the core brand VW Passenger Cars. Diess did not want to comment on concrete figures. “That has not been decided yet,” he said.
The main plant in Wolfsburg is currently operating at low capacity, mainly due to bottlenecks in chip supply.
According to circles, the Volkswagen Group wants to postpone the decisions over the medium-term investment planning that were initially scheduled for November.
The so-called planning round, which determines the billions in capital expenditure for the next five years and thus also decides on the model allocation of plants, needs more time, according to sources close to the company on Thursday.
A meeting of the supervisory board had been planned for November 12, but now the consultations are to be concluded in December.
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