After announcing reduced hours for employees in Landshut, Berlin, Dingolfing, and Regensberg—some 26,000 employees will work shorter hours on certain days in February and March—BMW GmbH Management Board member Harald Krüger, speaking with
Frankfurt Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, the Sunday edition of
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, insisted that employees will not be laid off. “There will be no enforced redundancies in 2009,”' he said. “If the crisis lasts longer than anticipated, we will not fill vacancies that become free.”
Harald Krüger
As for the workers in Germany who have had their hours cut, Krüger—whose official title is Human Resources, Industrial Relations Director, a position he has held since December 1—said BMW was confident that these employees would return to full-time work by April. Maintaining BMW’s independence, Krüger further iterated that BMW would not request a German government bailout—nor would it consider any sort of merger with another carmaker. “BMW’s autonomy is not in question,” he said.
Like every other automaker, BMW has been hit hard by the global slump in car sales; in January, the firm announced that December sales had dropped by more than 25% compared to December 2007. But Krüger has told the Associated Press that BMW has “high hopes” for its new models: the revamped Z4, which will be launched this Spring, and the new 7 Series, which BMW is rolling out in China and the United States.
Neither niche model sold particularly well in its previous generation before the recession, so few observers expect a huge sales surge from either model. The Z4, a delightful bauble, is nevertheless an unnecessary frill—and when times get hard, buyers cut out the frills. The new 7 Series is a technological masterpiece, but flooring at over $80,000 in the U.S., it is hardly BMW’s bread-and-butter sales-volume leader.—
Satch Carlson
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