Volkswagen Shares Plunge to Extremely Oversold Levels as Boardroom Showdown Nears Over 100,000 Job Cuts

Volkswagen shares hit 52-week low as a boardroom conflict over radical restructuring, including 100,000 job cuts and four plant closures, threatens an extraordinary shareholder meeting. Bain Capital buys engine unit stake; Chinese models may save factories.

Volkswagen shares have fallen into deeply oversold territory, with the stock’s relative strength index hitting around 20, as a bitter boardroom conflict over the future of Europe’s largest carmaker threatens to spill into an extraordinary shareholder meeting. After touching a fresh 52-week low of €69.20 on Wednesday, the shares clawed back to €70.56, but remain down by roughly a third since the start of the year. The primary source of the sell-off is a restructuring plan so radical it pits management directly against labor representatives and the state of Lower Saxony, which holds a blocking minority on the supervisory board.

Fresh Cash From Bain and a Costly Software Divorce

Amid the turmoil, the company is moving decisively to shore up its balance sheet and cut deadweight. Bain Capital has agreed to acquire a 51% stake in Volkswagen’s engine subsidiary Everllence for €7.4 billion, with the proceeds earmarked for the expansion of the electric vehicle lineup. At the same time, Wolfsburg has pulled the plug on a four-year development partnership with Bosch for autonomous driving technology. The alliance, which consumed roughly €1.5 billion and employed more than 1,000 developers, failed to produce a competitive system. Volkswagen will now purchase the technology from external suppliers instead, part of a wider drive to salvage the group’s strained investment budget, which has been slashed to around €130 billion over the next five years.

Up to 100,000 Positions on the Block

The austerity push on the core automotive business is far more draconian. By 2035, management wants to eliminate more than 100,000 positions — roughly 15% of the global workforce — and close four German plants in Hannover, Zwickau, Emden, and Neckarsulm, the last being the Audi factory. Without these cuts, the company warns it faces existential losses from the next decade onward. The IG Metall union and Lower Saxony’s state government have vowed to block the closures.

An Unlikely Lifeline From China

To keep assembly lines running at the threatened factories, Volkswagen is weighing a strategy shift that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: building Chinese-developed models in Europe. The SUV ID. Era 9X, co-designed with SAIC, is one candidate, and a second model could follow by the end of 2027. Developing vehicles in China costs nearly half as much as in Europe, making the approach a potential lifeline for the Zwickau plant, which is seen as the most vulnerable. Lower Saxony’s premier, Olaf Lies, has thrown his support behind the initiative as a way to preserve jobs.

The July 9 Reckoning and the BYD Threat

All eyes are now on the supervisory board’s meeting on July 9, 2026, where the restructuring package will be formally debated. Should the labor-friendly board block the cuts, management has prepared an alternative: an extraordinary general meeting at which shareholders would vote directly on the plan. Economists warn that time is running out. Moritz Schularick of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy suggests that if the turnaround fails, a takeover by Chinese rival BYD is a real possibility down the road — a scenario made more plausible by BYD’s ongoing search for a European production site in Spain or France. For Volkswagen, the clock is ticking louder with each passing day below €70.