Schaeffler to Cut 3,460 Jobs in Europe, Names Humanoid Robotics as a Growth Area

Schaeffler will cut a net 3,460 positions in Europe and close five sites, the German supplier announced on November 3. About 2,660 of the cuts fall in Germany. The program mainly targets the automotive business, while the company names humanoid robotics and defense as the growth areas meant to absorb part of the reduction.

Key Takeaways

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• Schaeffler expects one-time costs of about €480 million and annual savings of about €300 million by 2030; most of the cost will be booked in 2026.
• Half of the affected roles are in production and 30% are in research and development, across 16 European locations.
• The company says new positions in growth areas such as humanoid robotics and defense will offset at least part of the cuts, but gives no number.
• Schaeffler's humanoid incoming orders stood at around €400 million as of October 20. That figure is orders, not revenue.

Where the cuts fall

The program closes the Dortmund plant, which employs 430 people, and the Morbach site, which employs 160. Both belong to the Powertrain & Chassis division and make products for combustion engines. Schaeffler will also end operations in Berlin, where about 270 people work, and close its Schwalbach site. It expects most of those roughly 385 employees to transfer to Frankfurt, with around 190 positions cut. The fifth closure is a production site in Herstal, Belgium, with about 15 employees. Capacity at sites in France and Slovakia, and at several other German locations, will be reduced.

The German reductions equal about 9% of Schaeffler's core German workforce of 31,957, and are due by 2028. Including earlier programs and the 1,800 partial-retirement agreements signed in early October, the share rises to about 18%. Most of the measures are scheduled for 2027 and 2028.

CEO Klaus Rosenfeld told Reuters that "our personnel costs in Germany are around 2.5 times higher than in other European countries." He did not rule out further cuts after 2028. The management board will take a 10% pay cut over two years, Rosenfeld said on the analyst call, as the first part of a voluntary pay reduction Schaeffler plans across all levels of the company.

Humanoids as part of the offset

The release names robotics directly. "The Schaeffler Group has promising growth opportunities in future-oriented fields, particularly in the areas of humanoid robotics and defense," said Dr. Jochen Schröder, Schaeffler's chief operating officer. "Here, we can draw on the technological expertise we have developed in our core business."

Rosenfeld made a similar point to CNBC. The company is "rearranging here certain capacities to free up also capacity for the new things that are coming," he said, adding that those businesses "are not coming in the same synchronized manner as we would like to see it."

Schaeffler published nine-month results the same day. Revenue was €17.48 billion, close to the prior year at constant currency, and EBIT before special items rose 6.5% to €794 million. "Especially in humanoid robotics, we won new customers and continued to expand our order book during the reporting period," Rosenfeld said in the release. The company confirmed its 2026 guidance.

The order book and the restructuring bill

The latest figure for that order book came two weeks earlier, when Schaeffler opened its Taicang factory in China, where six humanoids assemble actuators and other joint components for other robots. Two new customers in Greater China had brought global humanoid incoming orders to around €400 million, the company said at the time. It did not name the customers or give a delivery schedule.

Gennaro Cuofano of the business-analysis site FourWeekMBA set that number against the restructuring: the €480 million one-time cost is 1.2 times the humanoid order intake, or about €139,000 per position cut. Schaeffler does not make that comparison, and the two figures measure different things. Orders turn into revenue over delivery periods the company has not disclosed, and robotics accounted for less than 1% of group sales in 2025.

The comparison does show the difference in scale. In May, Rosenfeld said he expected the humanoid order book to reach the hundreds of millions of euros by 2030. Schaeffler reached that range within six months. The Powertrain & Chassis division, home to the two combustion-engine plants being closed, generated €6.3 billion in revenue in the first nine months of this year alone.

A robotics strategy built on the auto business

Schaeffler's robotics push draws on its automotive and industrial manufacturing base. It sells robot makers planetary gear actuators and is preparing formed strain wave gearboxes for mass production in 2027. Both products come out of the precision-manufacturing expertise behind its bearings and drivetrain parts.

It is also a buyer. Schaeffler has committed to deploying thousands of robots from Neura Robotics, 1,000 of Hexagon's AEON humanoids and a multi-thousand-unit rollout with UK-based Humanoid across its plants. In October, Schröder told Gasgoo that the company's more than 100 factories worldwide gave humanoids a setting for productivity gains, and that integration and maintenance services for customers could follow.

The share of cuts in research and development drew comment. ING senior economist Rico Luman told CNBC it surprised him "a bit as there's a lot of effort required to develop new products and markets." Schaeffler describes the R&D reductions as adjusting development capacity in its automotive original-equipment business, and does not say whether robotics engineering is affected.

In March, Rosenfeld defended the company's physical AI strategy while issuing a cautious outlook for 2026. Schaeffler has not said how many jobs it expects to add in robotics or defense, or when.