Fire people who are making a product customers want to buy so you can fund new products that customers don’t want to buy. It sounds like a winning business strategy. From Eric Peters at theburningplatform.com:
Electric cars are costing us more than just too much money.
They’re also costing jobs.
Just in time for Thanksgiving, Audi announced the end of 9,500 of them – to help finance the development of electric cars. “We are now tackling structural issues in order to prepare Audi for the challenges ahead,” said Audi’s CEO Bram Schot.
The “structural issues” he speaks of are the outlawing of other-than-electric cars by the German government, effective come 2030.
The jobs lost amount to 15 percent of the company’s German workforce and by eliminating them, Audi will “raise” $6.6 billion – that is, cannibalize itself of that sum – to manufacture products it can’t make money selling but which the German government is forcing them to make.
Days later, Mercedes-Benz announced it was laying off another 10,000 – for the same reason.
VW Chief Herbet Diess says it could cost 100,000 jobs.
This is the way it ends. Not with a bang but with a whirr.
