The French car manufacturer Renault announced on Wednesday June 24 a voluntary departure plan in France concerning 800 engineers, mainly in the Île-de-France region, as part of a plan to reorganize its engineering division intended to face Chinese competition.
Of the group’s 5,500 engineers in France, 800 voluntary departures will take place by “the end of 2027”, Renault indicated during a telephone press briefing on Wednesday evening. At the same time, the car manufacturer intends to recruit between 150 and 200 new engineers on permanent contracts.
The announcement was made to the social partners during the day, during the presentation of a reorganization plan for this division. This plan notably plans to “simplify” the organization and fragment functions less to increase “the speed of execution”, according to the group. It also aims to review skills, with a training plan (200,000 hours), internal mobility, the recruitment of 150 to 200 engineers (for software, on-board artificial intelligence, electrification) and 800 voluntary departures.
“Chinese manufacturers are significantly increasing their market shares in Europe: it was less than 3% in 2024, it is 8.8% at the end of May,” underlined the group’s global head of technology (CTO), Philippe Brunet. “These market shares can be explained by products with significant technological content and also very competitive costs (…) We must be able to be competitive in relation to that,” he added.
Renault confirmed on April 10, following information from Ouest-France, its intention to reduce the number of its engineering positions in its global workforce by 15 to 20%. The group currently has 11,000 engineers worldwide, half of whom are in France, out of a total global workforce of 100,000 people.
