German car industry loses 48,700 jobs by 2025

The German automotive industry lost 48,700 jobs in the past year, the figure was released by the Federal Statistical Office. This is a drop of 6.3 per cent in the first nine months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024 and represents the largest decline in industries with more than 200,000 employees.

The crisis in the automotive sector therefore grinds out important numbers in the country that is first in terms of production volumes in Europe and also in terms of the number of registrations on the market. A supremacy that costs dearly to Germany, home of the main European groups including Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes, which is also paying the price for the strong disaffection of the Chinese market - a market to which the main German players are very exposed - with respect to European brands.

In the context of the difficult industrial situation in Germany, there was also a 5.4 per cent drop in metal production and processing and a 3 per cent drop in precision optics. For the automotive sector, the decline mainly affected supplier companies, which recorded a 4% cut in jobs in the bodywork, superstructure and trailer sectors, while it was as much as 11% for the production of automotive parts and accessories. The drop for manufacturers, on the other hand, is only 3.8%.

Suffering in Germany, therefore, is above all the supply chain of Tier1 and Tier2 manufacturers, which are absorbing the repercussions of shrinking production volumes and the downsizing of the market, which on average across Europe is worth around 20% less than in 2019, the year before the Covid crisis. In the first half of the year, registrations in Europe's largest market (25% share) fell by 4.9% compared to -1.9% for the European average. As for global car production, it grew by 3.5% in the first half of the year, while European volumes contracted by 2.6%. In this context, Germany still managed to recover 4.4% more production than in the first half of 2024, with a 35% share of the entire European car production (source: Acea).

The repercussions of the slowdown in the German automotive industry are felt by the entire Italian automotive industry, which has Germany as its leading export market and which, from January to August, saw exports fall by about 2.3% overall, a contraction that follows the -2.9% drop in 2024 and that cost Italian exports more than one and a half billion in the two-year period.