With over 118 production plants in 20 European countries and a further 10 countries in the Americas, Asia and Africa, a German company which hires around 6.71 lakh people is planning to shed up to 5,000 jobs between now and the end of 2023.
This German automaker is Volkswagen.
According to a Moneycontrol report, the company has taken this decision as a part of cost-cutting to finance its transition to electric vehicles. The Volkswagen Group sells its vehicles in 153 countries. This decision comes at a time when Tesla announced its plans to open a manufacturing plant just outside Berlin next July. Elon Musk’s company also plans to up its sales in European market, putting pressure on automakers like Volkswagen.
The company did not give a precise figure for those employees, saying only that it would be in the lower end of a "four-digit number", an expression usually used to mean between 2,000 to 4,000.
The job losses were intended to make a major contribution to managing the company's costs, said the statement.
"Thanks to our high level of investment in the expansion of electromobility and digitisation, Volkswagen has been able to establish itself as a pioneer of automotive change," human resources director Gunnar Killian said in the statement.
This latest round of jobs cuts follows the 2019 announcement of up to 7,000 job losses by the group's leading brand, VW
