Porsche to eliminate roughly one in five positions and invest €2.1 billion in Germany

## The new package will remove another 5,000 positions

Porsche’s Executive Board and employee representatives agreed a Future Package on 27 July 2026 under which the company will reduce its workforce by a further 5,000 positions by 2035. It intends to achieve most of the reduction through natural attrition, demographic change, an expanded partial-retirement programme and voluntary severance agreements. Compulsory redundancies are ruled out until the end of 2035.

The new package comes on top of 3,900 job reductions announced in 2025. Of those, 1,900 are structural cuts and around 2,000 result from fixed-term contracts being allowed to expire. In 2026, Porsche also decided to close battery subsidiary Cellforce, e-bike drive developer Porsche eBike Performance and software company Cetitec, affecting more than 500 employees.

Taken literally, the publicly announced figures amount to slightly more than 9,400 positions. Reuters rounds the overall restructuring programme to about 9,000 jobs. Against Porsche’s 42,615 employees at the end of 2024, those totals equate to a little over 22% and roughly 21%, respectively. “Around one job in five” is therefore fair shorthand, not a precise count of employees who will be made redundant.

## Porsche is not putting thousands of people out of work overnight

Calling this a conventional redundancy wave would be misleading. Porsche is not terminating 9,000 employment contracts at once. It is reducing headcount over nine years and leaving some vacated positions unfilled.

The agreement nevertheless requires clear concessions from employees. A total of 3.5% of the current collectively agreed pay increase and future pay increases will be deferred until 2035. The company-funded portion of the Christmas bonus will fall from 45% to 5% by 2035, reducing the maximum payment from one month’s salary to 60% of a month’s salary. The limit for mobile working will also fall from 12 days to eight days per month.

Senior and top management will contribute as well, forgoing increases in basic pay on an equivalent scale in 2027 and 2028. Porsche will meanwhile pay employees a one-off transformation bonus of €1,500 in August 2026. IG Metall members will receive an additional €411, bringing their total payment to €1,911.

## Zuffenhausen and Weissach are protected until 2035

In return, Porsche is extending its site and employment guarantees for the Zuffenhausen plant and Weissach development centre until the end of 2035. It will invest a cumulative €2.1 billion in the two sites over that period.

Zuffenhausen will continue producing two-door sports cars and expand the volume of the Sonderwunsch personalisation programme. Weissach will retain development work for every model line. Porsche is therefore promising more than simply keeping the buildings open: the investment is tied to its most valuable manufacturing and engineering activities.

The agreement gives the German sites a more secure future for the next decade, but employees are helping to finance part of that security through slower pay growth, smaller bonuses and higher productivity. Porsche is not giving employment protection away; it is exchanging it for lower costs and greater flexibility.

## Profit collapsed, although one-off charges distort the picture

Porsche’s sales revenue fell by 9.5% in 2025 to €36.27 billion. Group operating profit dropped from €5.64 billion to €413 million, a decline of 92.7%, while the operating return on sales fell from 14.1% to 1.1%. The €410 million figure used in an earlier version was rounded; Porsche’s official result was €413 million.

Weaker vehicle sales were not the only reason for the collapse in reported profit. Porsche recorded approximately €3.9 billion in extraordinary expenses during 2025. Around €2.4 billion related to changes in product strategy and the rescaling of the company, while battery activities and US tariffs each accounted for roughly €700 million.

The 92.7% decline in reported operating profit therefore does not mean that the underlying vehicle business deteriorated by the same amount on a like-for-like basis. The 1.1% return on sales does, however, show just how expensive Porsche’s strategic reversals, battery projects and changed trading environment became.

## The sales decline extends far beyond China

Porsche delivered 279,449 vehicles in 2025, 10.1% fewer than a year earlier. In the first half of 2026, deliveries were a further 16% lower year on year, at 122,306 cars.

China remained the most painful market. Porsche delivered 14,501 vehicles there during the first six months of 2026, 32% fewer than in the same period a year earlier. The company attributed the decline to difficult market conditions and its continued focus on value-oriented sales rather than maximising volume.

The downturn was not confined to China. Deliveries fell by 13% in North America, 14% in Europe excluding Germany and 6% in Porsche’s home market. The overall result was also affected by the end of combustion-engined 718 production, the strong performance of the electric Macan a year earlier and the expiry of US tax incentives for electric and hybrid vehicles.

The 22% decline applied to the Macan model line as a whole, rather than specifically to the electric version. Porsche delivered 15,620 electric Macans and 19,695 combustion-engined examples in the first half. The company cited the slower-than-expected ramp-up of electromobility, the previous year’s strong comparison base and the expiry of US tax incentives as the main factors.

## Porsche must cut model complexity as well as jobs

Chief executive Michael Leiters has also identified Porsche’s increasingly complex product range as a problem. The company is reducing the number of variants, sharpening the positioning of individual models and looking for more opportunities to make intelligent use of Volkswagen Group platforms and modular systems.

Porsche will continue investing in combustion engines, hybrids and fully electric vehicles. The 911 will not become fully electric; Porsche describes its performance-hybrid system as a fundamental building block for the model’s future. At the same time, the Cayenne Electric will help show whether Porsche can make a large battery-powered SUV as desirable as its combustion-engined cars.

Developing several powertrain types in parallel gives customers more choice, but also raises costs. Porsche must fund combustion engines, hybrids, batteries, software and new electric platforms while sales volumes are falling and China is no longer delivering the growth it once did.

## Even Porsche cannot escape the pressure on Europe’s car industry

Porsche is not on the verge of collapse. It still has high net liquidity, a healthy balance sheet, a premium-priced model range and the 911, whose deliveries rose by 19% in the first half of 2026.

The disappearance of roughly 9,000 positions nevertheless shows that even one of the world’s strongest sports-car brands must adapt to lower sales volumes, Chinese competition, the cost of electrification and tariffs. Porsche’s answer is no longer to pursue growth at almost any price, but to become a smaller company with a simpler model range and a stronger focus on profitability rather than volume.

The Future Package does not mark the end of Porsche. It marks the end of an era in which the company could assume that Chinese growth, high margins and an endlessly expanding model range would pay for every expensive experiment.