German car parts manufacturer Schaeffler has announced plans to lay off approximately 4,700 employees at its European plants as part of a restructuring program aimed at maintaining long-term competitiveness.
The layoffs will impact ten factories in Germany and five others across Europe including two in the Czech towns of Lanškroun and Svitavy. The company employs around 120,000 people globally.
In Germany, 2,800 jobs will be cut by 2027, with another 1,900 positions eliminated at plants abroad. This reduction accounts for about 3.1 percent of Schaeffler’s total workforce.
The company has stated that two of the five non-German plants will be shut down entirely with further details about which facilities will close expected to be released by the end of the year.
“The program is necessary in the current situation in order to preserve the competitiveness of the Schaeffler Group in the long term,” said Klaus Rosenfeld, the company’s CEO.
The announcement follows Schaeffler’s recent merger with Vitesco Technologies and comes as part of a larger strategy to save €290 million annually starting in 2029.
Schaeffler is not the only company in Germany’s struggling car sector undertaking mass redundancies. Automotive suppliers, in particular, have been forced to adapt to disruptive changes in the industry, including the shift towards electric vehicles. This latest round of cuts follows previous layoffs by Schaeffler, including 4,400 jobs in 2020 and 1,300 in 2022.
Volkswagen, Europe’s largest car manufacturer, recently announced plans to close at least three German plants and reduce wages by 10 percent with thousands of jobs expected to be cut and bonuses canceled.
The German auto industry employs 779,662 people as of 2023, but already, between 2019 and 2023, 46,000 jobs were lost. Many other industries indirectly and directly depend on the auto sector, which has been a key pillar of the German economy for decades.
