Continental chief blames politicians for disrupting auto industry

Wolfgang Reitzle, a well-known German businessman and chairman of the Continental supervisory board, accused politicians of destroying the automotive industry. Car buyers are being forced to “e-mobility, which is not yet quite ready to enter the market, and manufacturers, knowing this, are forced to offer it,” he complained in an interview with the German news portal Pioneer.

In particular, the businessman accused politicians of complicity in the widespread job cuts in the company.

“You are politically destroying the automotive industry, which still generates 99% of its value-added from combustion-engine vehicles. The result: we have to close our factories and cut jobs, ”Reitzle says.

Reitzle, who in the past ran the forklift truck company Linde and now serves on the supervisory boards of several large companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Holcim, KION Group and Deutsche Bank, in addition to Continental, notes that the automotive industry has been boom, and in mid-2018 the situation began to deteriorate, in 2019 a serious recession followed in the global automotive industry, and since March this year, the epidemic has "finished off" the situation.

The reduction of the auto industry, according to him, this year will be 30%, and no industrial company can cope with this without optimizing costs. The draconian measures to reduce harmful emissions from cars are worsening the position of automakers and the worst thing is that politicians in many countries are in a hurry to "bury" the internal combustion engine, and automakers simply do not have time to adapt.

It was not by chance that Wolfgang Reitzle made such harsh statements, Continental, one of the largest suppliers of tires and auto components in the world, under the pressure of the industry crisis and the consequences of the coronavirus, took a course to tighten savings. Conti wants to “optimize”, and in fact eliminate, 30,000 jobs worldwide, 13,000 of them in Germany. True, formally, we are talking about the fact that employees will undergo retraining, and some of them will be involved in other areas of work. However, everyone understands everything, and representatives of the trade union committees have already reacted sharply to these plans.

Continental is also known to be closing its Aachen and Karben branches. Moreover, the closure of the plant in Aachen was announced so suddenly that it caused a lot of negative emotions.

When asked if Continental had a vision for the future, Reitzle replied: “We have to make these bitter decisions because we have a large program in development related to automated driving. To be able to finance this, to move forward, reductions, alas, are inevitable. "

He was argued with by the Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, Stefan Weil, who believes that the automotive industry, including suppliers, should be held accountable for reacting too late to structural changes in society. The problems of the industry are undeniable, especially for small and medium-sized suppliers in the auto industry. Nevertheless, “we must abandon the internal combustion engine and focus on electric mobility,” the politician insists.