Reports indicate that BMW Brilliance initiated layoffs affecting approximately 1,800 employees on November 2, offering N+5 compensation. The cuts primarily hit front-line production positions, though management roles were also impacted. Once the news broke, the most fundamental question surfaced: if these people are let go, will BMW Brilliance sell better? The answer is no. Layoffs are a financial tourniquet, not a market cure.

The N+5 Math Is Clear, but the Money Saved Cannot Buy Competitiveness

Based on BMW Brilliance's workforce of roughly 19,000 and a layoff scale of 1,800, with an estimated average comprehensive employment cost per person—including wages, social insurance, housing provident fund, and indirect allocations—of 150,000 to 200,000 yuan annually, the direct labor cost savings would amount to approximately 270 million to 360 million yuan per year.

As for the N+5 compensation, assuming the laid-off employees have an average company tenure of eight years, a pre-tax monthly salary of 10,000 yuan, and a base salary of 8,000 yuan, each person would receive roughly "eight months of pre-tax salary plus five months of base salary"—about 120,000 yuan—bringing the total compensation for 1,800 people to approximately 216 million yuan.

The one-time compensation expense could be recouped in about a year through labor cost savings. On paper, it looks cost-effective. But here's the problem: those laid off are mainly front-line production workers, and R&D positions were not the focus of this round of optimization.

At a time when intelligentization and electrification most urgently require "investment from zero," if the saved headcount costs are not simultaneously channeled into electric drive systems, intelligent driving, and localized software, the move will merely make the financial statements look a little better—product strength will not advance because of it.

Five Years of Continuous Sales Decline: The Root Cause Is Not Overcapacity, but Products That Miss the Market

BMW Brilliance's sales curve leaves no room for ambiguity: 673,600 vehicles in 2021, 665,000 in 2022, 646,200 in 2023, 607,800 in 2024, and 525,700 in 2025. Over five years, sales slid from close to 670,000 vehicles down to the 520,000 level—a decline of more than 20%—and the downturn clearly accelerated in 2024–2025.

The decline has not stopped in 2026. From January to September, cumulative sales totaled approximately 316,900 vehicles, with the year-on-year drop in September alone exceeding 33%. The fundamental reason for this decline is not that "Chinese consumers no longer buy BMW," but that the new energy products BMW has introduced in the price band above 300,000 yuan no longer offer a reason that makes consumers feel they "must buy."

Early models such as the i3, iX1, and i5 were all built on the CLAR combustion-electric shared platform—essentially "oil-to-electric" conversions. Battery layout was restricted, space utilization suffered, pure electric range and charging efficiency lagged behind native pure electric platforms, intelligent driving long remained at basic L2, and cockpit interaction and OTA iteration speed trailed the new forces.

In July 2026, BMW Brilliance simply discontinued these three domestically produced pure electric models, and the pure electric product line was temporarily reduced to zero. This active "reset to zero" on the product side is itself a negation of the previous stage of the electrification route.

What Took Market Share Was Not "Luck," but the Product Definition Power of China's Technology Luxury Brands

During the same period, the assault by China's new forces in the market above 300,000 yuan was systemic. Among the top ten best-selling pure electric models above 300,000 yuan in 2025, the NIO ES8 and ES6, AITO M8 and M9, and Li Auto i8 and MEGA occupied most of the places. The BMW i5 ranked only 14th with 7,461 vehicles, and Audi and Mercedes-Benz pure electric products also ranked lower.

Li Auto reached a peak of 506,000 vehicles in 2024. Although it fell back to 409,000 vehicles in 2025, it was still far higher than the contribution of BMW Brilliance's new energy models in the same year; NIO delivered 327,000 vehicles in 2025, up nearly 47% year on year; HarmonyOS Intelligent Mobility (AITO and others) reached annual sales of 589,100 vehicles.

More critical is where users are going: in the first half of 2025, the proportion of luxury brand users switching to Chinese brands reached 41.9%, and the BBA customer base is being systematically diverted. It is not that the new forces "stole" BMW's sales, but that BMW actively surrendered the power of definition in the new category of intelligent electric luxury.

2026 Forecast: Difficult to Stay Above 400,000 Vehicles for the Full Year, Essentially No Hope of Meeting Targets

Based on about 317,000 vehicles from January to September, even if the fourth quarter maintains an average monthly level of 32,000–33,000 vehicles, the full year will only land in the range of 380,000–400,000 vehicles. BMW Brilliance's full-year sales in 2025 were 525,700 vehicles, which means that in 2026 its year-on-year decline will most likely fall between 25% and 28%.

If any sales target close to the 500,000-vehicle level was set at the beginning of the year, the completion rate will be less than 80%. It should be noted that the product gap brought about by the discontinuation of pure electric models in July 2026, combined with the fact that new generation models have not yet formed scale deliveries, makes an effective rebound in the fourth quarter difficult.

The Next Five Years: Does BMW Brilliance Still Have a Chance?

BMW is not without trump cards. The Neue Klasse platform is a true native pure electric architecture. The all-new iX3 has made substantive catch-up efforts in the electronic and electrical architecture, range, and localized intelligent cockpit, introducing HUAWEI HiCar, Alibaba AI large models, and DeepSeek capabilities. The direction is right.

Chinese consumers' brand trust in BMW still exists, and this is an asset the new forces do not have in the short term. But "having a chance" does not mean "being able to recover" the sales of its peak period in China.

To return to a strong position in the new energy luxury market over the next five years, BMW needs to do three things: First, the pricing of new generation models must be set right in one step—it cannot repeat the old path of "high opening, low closing, exchanging price for volume," otherwise the brand premium will be consumed a second time;

Third, truly put R&D investment ahead of Chinese market demand, rather than taking global models and adapting them. If the money saved from layoffs is only used to make the financial reports "look good for one year," then looking back five years from now, it will be nothing more than a belated cost correction. What can save BMW Brilliance has never been N+5, but a car that makes Chinese consumers feel that "at this price, BMW is indeed more worth it than the new forces."