Rising euro pushes BMW into eliminating 8,100 jobs
Posted by walker on February 28th, 2008
BMW, the German luxury carmaker, announced Wednesday that it was eliminating 8,100 jobs, as the rising euro pushed the company into the kind of tough cost-cutting it had long resisted.
Germany is home to roughly 80,000 of BMW’s 108,000 employees, an unusual constellation for a company that earns 80 percent of its sales outside its home country. That has created a problem because costs are largely denominated in euros but revenues are heavily dollar-based, owing to sales in the United States. That makes the company acutely sensitive to currency fluctuations.
