Porsche is reportedly cutting thousands more jobs, on top of the cuts already agreed
A 91 percent profit collapse leaves very little room to manoeuvre
Porsche has spent this year making a series of uncomfortable corrections, and the next one lands on its own workforce. German media report that a further 5,000 to 6,000 jobs will go by 2035, in addition to reductions already agreed. These are reports rather than a company announcement, and Porsche has not confirmed the numbers.
What is reported
The cuts are said to target 5,000 to 6,000 positions by 2035, concentrated in administration, management and development functions at the German operations rather than on the production line. The plans may be presented to workers within the week, and the supervisory board has reportedly signed off on a wider restructuring package.
What has already gone
This is not the beginning of the process. Around 3,900 redundancies were announced previously, roughly 4,000 further cuts are already scheduled by 2029 in the Stuttgart region, some 2,000 temporary contracts have expired, and around 500 people were affected by the closure of three subsidiaries. Stack those against the new figure and the scale of the retrenchment becomes clear.
The numbers behind it
Porsche's 2025 was brutal. Net profit fell 91.4 percent to 310 million euro, revenue dropped almost 10 percent to 36.3 billion euro, and the operating margin came down to 1.1 percent from the double digits the company had grown used to. For a manufacturer whose entire investment case rested on premium margins, that is the whole story in three figures.
Why
Four pressures at once: weak sales in China, US tariffs on imports, the cost of reversing course on electrification after committing heavily to it, and a product range that had grown too complicated to be efficient. None of those is quickly fixed, and two of them are entirely outside Porsche's control.
What employees are being offered
Annual special payments have reportedly been capped at 1,500 euro, against several thousand in stronger years. In return, Porsche is said to have offered longer employment guarantees at its German sites during negotiations with worker representatives, which is the usual shape of these agreements: fewer people, but more security for those who remain.
The wider picture
Porsche is not an outlier. Parent company Volkswagen has been weighing very large reductions of its own, and the German automotive sector is facing the loss of around 225,000 jobs by 2035, on top of roughly 100,000 already gone since 2019. Chinese competition, the cost of the electric transition and the winding down of combustion engineering are hitting every manufacturer in the country at once.
AutoNext Take
It is worth stating plainly that these are thousands of people's livelihoods, most of them engineers and office staff in and around Stuttgart, and the enthusiast conversation about which models survive matters a great deal less than that. Porsche is a company with a genuine problem rather than a company being greedy: a margin of 1.1 percent does not fund anything, and the alternative to restructuring is not carrying on as before.
What is harder to forgive is how much of this was self-inflicted. The China exposure and the tariffs were bad luck, but committing hard to an all-electric future and then reversing it cost enormous sums, and the bloated model range was a choice nobody forced. The people now losing their jobs were not the ones who made those decisions.
