Mercedes-Benz Ties Buyback to a Long Haul on Staffing and Speed
Published on 10/27/2026 at 06:30 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Mercedes-Benz bought back 1,145,820 of its own shares last week, extending a programme that has now amassed 6,487,389 shares since it began on 1 September, according to a mandatory disclosure published yesterday. The figure is the hard, settled part of a story that otherwise runs on intentions: alongside the completed purchases, the carmaker is reshaping its workforce and its development machine on timelines stretching to the end of the decade.
The stock added 1.4% yesterday, though a single session's move cannot be pinned on the buyback or the restructuring plans with any confidence.
Two Clocks Running at Once
What separates the announcements is status. Share purchases are done and documented. The personnel and efficiency measures are reported ambitions, and investors would be wrong to book possible relief as gains already banked.
On the labour side, the voluntary exit programmes reach beyond administration and engineering into production. According to Handelsblatt, packages are running at the component plants in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim and Berlin, with severance of up to EUR 330,000 available to employees aged 50. These are not new experiments: Untertürkheim has offered the annual schemes since 2019 and Berlin since 2022, with further rounds scheduled each autumn through the end of 2029.
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That long horizon matters for interpretation. The programmes aim at gradual change and rest on employees choosing to leave, so the size of the maximum package says nothing on its own about how many will go or what the earnings effect will be.
A fresh round is due from December 2026 for roughly 38,000 staff in administration and development. More than 5,500 employees in the indirect area have already taken up the offer.
Untertürkheim Shows the Pace
The scale of the adjustment is visible at Untertürkheim, where Mercedes employed 12,500 people in 2025 — 22% fewer than in the comparison year. Voluntary schemes and natural retirement are separate routes to a smaller headcount, and both are in play.
The backdrop is a shifting sales mix. Mercedes expects battery-electric cars and hybrids to account for a combined 40% of sales in 2028/29, and 20% of the workforce is set to leave on age grounds over the next ten years.
Alongside this, Handelsblatt reports plans to cut temporary agency staff in Germany by "several thousand" as part of a productivity drive aimed at saving EUR 800 million a year in the country. Mercedes did not confirm the specific magnitude of the plan reported on Friday.
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EUR 500 Million Bet on Faster Cars
Development speed is the other front. On 21 October the company announced PLM.AI, a digital platform linking engineering, purchasing, production, sales and after-sales, backed by around EUR 500 million of investment. Mercedes expects it to shorten vehicle development time by up to 30%, or roughly 17 months.
The company is also working on a modular kit for the next model generation of the 2030s, letting different body parts be combined according to vehicle size. Mercedes told the newspaper it has a "very ambitious future plan".
For shareholders, the question is less the size of any individual severance cheque than how the headcount reduction is matched to the expected shift in the vehicle business. The offer rounds running to the end of the decade make one thing plain: this is a long-distance job, not a sprint.
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