Polestar will lay off 15 percent of its employees to face current market conditions

The Swedish manufacturer has just announced its intention to dispense with 450 of its employees, which represents approximately 15 percent of the total. The company justifies this decision as a necessary step to face “the challenging challenges posed by current market conditions”. Although it has not clarified more precisely what it means by this statement.

Polestar recently carried out a restructuring of its management team, after failing to reach the sales target set for 2023. Therefore, the dismissal of these 450 employees seems like another step in its strategy to try to steer the company’s course.

The Swedish manufacturer announced, however, back in November its intention to reduce costs to increase margins going forward. At that time, a company spokesperson commented that its new action plan involved adjusting the size of the business and its operations. A measure that necessarily required reducing some external costs and also the number of employees. For the time being, however, it is unknown which employees will be affected or how they are geographically distributed.

With confidence in what the future holds

At Polestar’s management, they believe that implementing this plan will allow them to achieve positive results from 2025 onward, thereby reducing their dependence on financing from Volvo, or from Geely itself. However, for this to be the case, annual production volume will need to be between 155,000 and 165,000 vehicles. That figure is three times higher than the one recorded in 2023, although the availability of new models in the company’s lineup, such as the Polestar 3 or the Polestar 4, will undoubtedly be of great help.

The recent replacement of the company’s finance and sales chief now raises the question, on the other hand, of whether this strategy will be maintained as originally designed or whether there will be some last-minute change.

In Europe, the Swedish manufacturer currently sells only the Polestar 2, although the Polestar 3 and the Polestar 4 will not be long in arriving. The company has already delivered the first units of the latter in China, and it is expected that this same week the first European customers will also get behind the wheel of this new electric crossover.