62,500 employees affected: Bosch is repositioning itself - central areas are being outsourced

The technology group Bosch wants to become faster and more flexible in order to better keep up with the competition from Asia. To do this, the company is rearranging its structure. Except for headquarters and research, all areas will be outsourced. Nothing should change for the employees.

The Bosch foundation group is rearranging its group structure in Germany and transferring the core business of automotive supply, mobility, as well as central service areas into independent subsidiaries. Around 62,500 employees are expected to move to the new companies, as the Stuttgart technology company announced. The existing employment contracts should be transferred to the new units. The new legal entities are scheduled to begin operational work on August 1, 2027.

Bosch is thus aligning its structure in Germany with other corporate divisions such as Industrial Technology, in which the various business areas are already managed as separate subsidiaries. In the future, Robert Bosch GmbH will primarily function as an umbrella company and corporate headquarters, including central research. It will then employ 3,000 people.

With this step, Bosch wants to become faster and more flexible in view of the growing competitive pressure, especially from Asia. “We have to bring innovations onto the market even faster, noticeably simplify structures and processes and overall increase our speed in order to maintain our competitiveness,” explained the new CEO Christian Fischer.

The Mobility division is the group's largest division. Last year, it contributed almost 56 billion euros, around 60 percent of the Bosch Group's total sales of 91 billion euros. Other business areas such as industrial technology or consumer goods are already managed in their own subsidiaries.

Bosch announced in June that it was no longer competitive in many areas. In order to turn things around, a lot of personnel and structures are being saved. Thousands of jobs are expected to be lost in the supply sector alone in the coming years. There are also plans to cut down in other areas - including the household appliance subsidiary BSH and the power tools division. Last year, Bosch was in the red for the first time since 2009.