Volkswagen wants to cut up to 100,000 jobs and shut four German plants — the biggest restructuring in the company’s 89-year history, roughly one in seven of everyone who works there. The sites on the chopping block, including Zwickau, Hanover, Emden, and Audi’s factory in Neckarsulm, employ more than 45,000 people between them. And the reason a worker in Emden is about to lose the thing his whole town is built around? Management got beaten in China. BYD and the other homegrown brands ate VW’s lunch, sales in its single biggest market fell 20 percent in one quarter, and the people who made every one of those strategic calls are still sitting in Wolfsburg with their jobs intact.
Here’s the part they’ll skate past: Volkswagen is not dying. It cleared €1.56 billion in net profit last quarter. Down from the year before, sure — but €1.56 billion in three months is not a company fighting for its life. That’s a company protecting a margin. Nobody on that assembly line voted on the EV rollout that came too late and cost too much. Nobody in Emden decided to price VW out of China. They just showed up and built the cars. Now they’re the ones being sent to pay for it.
The plants they’re closing are the ones that built the company into what it is. Emden has been building Volkswagens since 1964, longer than most of the executives making this call have been alive. The formal talks start July 9, and you already know the shape of them — a press release heavy on the word “transformation,” a share price that ticks up on the news, and 100,000 households told that a mistake they had no hand in is now theirs to eat. The executives who lost China will explain all of it from jobs they get to keep.