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Volvo Cars is in the midst of almost unbridled turmoil in the automotive industry: the focus is shifting from combustion cars to electric cars, from being cars to becoming advanced connected computers on four wheels.
Above all: the heart of the oily mechanical engine is replaced by software.
It’s a revolution
Thursday’s announcement that 650 employees will be laid off out of the 1,300 who were notified was certainly expected: The number of layoffs generally declines when the company, as in this case, comes out with selective severance.
Total with voluntary solutions 1,000 people will now leave the company.
But the most interesting thing the company’s human resources manager Hanna Fager said Thursday morning was that the movement is going faster than they thought.
There are big questions about the future of Sweden’s largest private company, which now expects to have 23,000 employees before the end of the year in Sweden.
A pervasive trend is that fewer electric cars and less mechanical development work are forcing car companies to slash suits.
I took the liberty of asking Volvo Car’s press department after Thursday’s announcement: How many will the company hire this year in the “skill shift”?
The answer: 100 people will be hired during the year in electricity and software.
Do you also add two and two? Just under a tenth of those who can now leave the company.
The upcoming career path in the automotive industry has been a secret topic in Sweden. In Germany, on the other hand, the cards are laid out on the table.
The government working group with the complicated name “National Platform for Future Mobility” came to the conclusion in January that the switch to electric cars in the worst case would pose a risk of 410,000 jobs, around half of German jobs in the auto industry in 2030.
Converted to Sweden, this means that 80,000 Swedish vehicle jobs are in danger.
In Sweden, no one has examined the question of where the most important Swedish labor sector is in ten years. It is infinitely slightly surprising.
The German The report he pointed that job creation in the auto industry is shifting from motors to software and battery manufacturing.
Batteries are expected to be the new gold in the auto industry. There is an almost furious global race for job creation and knowledge, which is currently led by the Chinese company CATL.
Sweden’s Northvolt is in the race, but neither Volvo Cars nor AB Volvo have shown interest. They both have Chinese bigwigs, by the way.
Volvo Cars that take their batteries from Asia, not from western Sweden.
What does this mean for jobs in western Sweden? No one seems to have an answer to that either.
One last discreet question: Can Volvo Cars find new software knowledge? Volvo Group’s new electric car, Polestar 2, has recently started to be delivered to customers. It is behind the scenes developed by Volvo engineers and it is drawn with major software problems where more and more images of 800,000 crowns of dead cars stopped with cables are shown on red car rescuers.
Can’t the best of them prefer to go to Google or Spotify?
CEO Håkan Samuelsson’s commitment to DN this summer that the company will have no fewer employees if ten sounds too empty right now.
