Porsche gave job security to German plants until 2035. It stays silent on Bratislava and the fate of the Cayenne

Porsche announced on Monday that it will cut a further 5,000 jobs in Germany by 2035. In exchange for wage concessions, employees in Zuffenhausen and Weissach will receive job security through 2035 and a €2.1 billion investment. The Leipzig plant was left out of the security package — precisely the site to which Porsche wants to move production of the Cayenne SUV from Volkswagen's Bratislava plant — and as of yet, neither the OZ KOVO trade union nor the Slovak Ministry of Economy has commented on Monday's announcement.

A Future Package that bypassed Leipzig

The Porsche AG executive board and the general works council signed the so-called Zukunftspaket — a future package — on Monday, which the company presents as a solution to a long-term crisis. By 2035, 5,000 more jobs will be cut, added to the 3,900 already agreed last February and 500 tied to the closure of subsidiary operations — more than 9,000 in total, roughly one in five current Porsche employees. In exchange, the company promised not to lay off anyone through forced redundancies until the end of 2035. The cuts will be carried out through retirements, part-time pre-retirement arrangements, and voluntary departures. Porsche Newsroom ↗

Porsche CEO Michael Leiters called the package "good for the company" because it "creates room for strategic realignment and investment in competitiveness." Works council chairman Ibrahim Aslan described it more soberly: "Compromises are part of negotiation. Now we're looking ahead — for the core workforce and for the Porsche brand." Employees will pay for it through a reduction of the Christmas bonus from 100 to 60 percent of monthly pay and a partial freeze on future pay rises through 2035. Electrive ↗

The agreement explicitly covers only Zuffenhausen, where the 911 model is built, and the Weissach development center. Leipzig, where SUV model lines are located and to which — according to German media reports in June — Cayenne production was also supposed to move from Bratislava, is absent from the text of the package. If the Leipzig plant is to be kept busy in the long term, relocating the Bratislava model could be one of the few ways to achieve that. This suggests Porsche is keeping its hands free when it comes to Leipzig. We wrote in June, when the first reports emerged about moving the Cayenne to Leipzig.

The numbers that explain why the company is cutting

The package arrives on the same day Porsche published its first-half results. Operating profit rose 34 percent year-on-year to €1.35 billion, and the margin improved from 5.5 to 7.8 percent — figures that at first glance don't look like a crisis. Yet they grew even though revenue fell by 5.1 percent and the number of cars delivered dropped by 16.5 percent to 122,000 units. According to Porsche, profit was driven mainly by cost management, pricing, product mix, and its "value-over-volume" strategy, not by sales growth. Euronews ↗

China hurts the most, where deliveries fell 32 percent to approximately 14,500 cars — for the first time fewer than what Porsche sold domestically in Germany. The company attributes this to a "persistently challenging environment" and its own emphasis on higher-margin sales over volume. Only the 911 model grew, by 19 percent, while the electric Taycan fell by a quarter. HNonline ↗

Bratislava awaits answers

While Germany received a date and concrete numbers, the fate of the Bratislava plant — where the Cayenne is assembled alongside the Volkswagen Touareg and Audi Q7 and Q8 — is discussed only in the conditional tense. Economist Vladimír Vaňo notes that the reason production ended up in Bratislava in the first place was not low labor cost but the ratio of cost to worker qualification, and that the plant has long run at approximately 73 percent capacity with high fixed costs, which complicates any relocation. ta3 ↗

The Slovak side of the story is not entirely silent — it has simply gone quiet. Back in June, when the plan to move the Cayenne was first reported, Economy Minister Denisa Saková said she had contacted Volkswagen Slovakia's management, who told her they would not yet comment on the speculation, while the opposition KDH party spoke at the time of a "devastating signal" for the country's competitiveness. openiazoch.zoznam.sk ↗ Since then, however, neither the ministry nor OZ KOVO has publicly commented on Monday's Porsche package or today's results. Moreover, the Volkswagen Group's supervisory board has postponed its decision on the broader Zielbild 2030 plan — 100,000 jobs and four German Volkswagen-brand plants — until after the summer break. RTVS ↗

The final word on the Cayenne is due to come at Porsche's Capital Markets Day in October. Until then, what held true in June still holds: production decisions are driven by German internal corporate employment politics, not by the cost of Slovak labor — only now the German side of the story already has a signed guarantee.

What hotinfo is watching

– October: Porsche's Capital Markets Day, where Leiters is expected to present the final decision on Cayenne production and the fate of the Leipzig plant.
– The first public statement from OZ KOVO or the Slovak government on Monday's package and its impact on Volkswagen Slovakia.
– The Volkswagen supervisory board's decision on the Zielbild 2030 plan (100,000 jobs, four German plants) after the summer break.
– Whether — and at what price — the Leipzig plant also secures its own job-security agreement.
– The concrete number of how many of the approximately 11,000 Bratislava jobs a Cayenne relocation would actually put at risk.