After the disposal of the branch dedicated to electric micromobility Mobilize, the stop in car sharing of Zity, and the dismantling of the EV car division Ampere, Renault is now cutting staff. The restart of the Diamond, in fact, according to what the French press reports, involves not only a strategy that is increasingly less electric but also painful cuts.
RENAULT’S DIET
Renault recently announced that in the next 24 months, 15 or possibly even 20 percent of engineers will be laid off. The reason? More than one. Among them, obviously, the difficulty of the entire automotive sector, the missteps on electric cars, and Chinese competition. All reasons why it is necessary to proceed at full speed with cost-cutting in search of improved margins.
CUTS IN EMERGING MARKETS
A particularly significant aspect is the geography of the cuts, which will mainly affect technical activities in countries such as Brazil, India, Morocco, Romania, South Korea, Spain, and Turkey. In large part, in other words (excluding the Iberian Peninsula), it coincides with the presence that the Horse business branch, responsible for combustion engine development, was supposed to have.
With the Ampere sister company shut down, which was supposed to be France-centric, the French company, which currently has 12,000 engineering positions and intends to drop below 10,000 units, will still maintain the main activities of new technology development and design in France.
ENGINEERS ARE NOW CHINESE
The phrase that Luca de Meo, former CEO of Renault, said some time ago to the Chinese newspaper China Daily about the necessity for everyone, including Westerners, to develop low-cost electric cars in the Dragon’s country (“When I proposed the idea to my team in France, they told me it was impossible, but in China, the engineers replied: ‘No problem’”) seems to be at the core of the current Renault CEO Francois Provost’s strategy, considering that the battery-powered Twingo will indeed be assembled in Europe but designed in the Far East. Will Western carmakers’ research and development increasingly look to Chinese engineers?
