EU manufacturing job cuts on a scale that would dwarf any single plant closure are accelerating, with industry body Eurostat data confirming the trade arithmetic that makes Eurometal’s warnings hard to dismiss.
Eurometal, the European metals distribution and processing trade association, is predicting 300,000 job losses in EU manufacturing before the end of 2026, driven by what its president, Alexander Julius, calls the deliberate “colonisation” of European supply chains by Chinese component manufacturers. On Monday, the organisation will stage a procession of 10 symbolic coffins around the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, each marked with phrases such as “EU competitiveness” and “European factories.”
It is a theatrical protest. But the numbers behind it are not theatrical at all.
The Trade Gap That Explains EU Manufacturing Job Cuts
According to Eurostat, the EU’s goods trade deficit with China reached €103 billion in Q2 2026, up from €66 billion in Q1 2024. EU imports from China climbed to €154 billion in Q2 2026, from €122 billion in Q1 2024. Those are not rounding errors; they are a structural shift.
The product composition of those imports tells you precisely where the threat is landing. In the first half of 2026, EU imports of electrical equipment from China rose by €6.2 billion compared with the same period in 2025, while machinery and mechanical parts rose by €4.1 billion. Vehicle imports, including parts, were up €5.9 billion. These are not finished luxury goods sitting on consumer shelves. They are the inputs that European factories need to remain competitive, and they are increasingly sourced from Chinese producers instead.
Analysis by Soapbox Trade in collaboration with the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) found that in February 2026, EU exports to China fell 16.2% year on year while imports rose 2.2%, widening the deficit by 14.1% to more than €1 billion a day. The trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, has described the EU’s €360 billion annual import/export imbalance with China as “not sustainable,” and both sides have agreed to three months of talks ending in October.
Julius does not sound like a man who expects those talks to change the structural dynamic. “China has made no secret of what it is doing. It is in their five-year plan,” he told the Guardian. “China doesn’t want to be a raw material supplier, it wants to be a finished product supply. They want to be in key product supply chains because they know that once they control the supply chain, they own the complete value chain.”
Costs That European Rivals Do Not Face
The mechanisms Julius identifies are specific. European metal manufacturers carry the weight of steel import tariffs and carbon emissions taxes. Chinese component manufacturers face none of those levies. Add the undervaluation of the yuan, and the cost gap is structural rather than cyclical. Companies, Julius observes, will keep buying from China regardless of political rhetoric, because they answer to shareholders first.
“When manufacturing leaves Europe, Europe not only loses production but investment, knowhow and long-term economic resilience,” Eurometal said ahead of the protest.
The backdrop is already grim. According to industriAll Europe, the EU lost approximately 200,000 manufacturing jobs in 2025 alone, with energy-intensive industries directly employing 2.6 million workers in the EU-27. The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) puts the longer trend in starker terms: the EU shed close to one million manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023, and the number of jobs lost to company restructuring in the first five months of 2025 was three times higher than in the equivalent period of 2022.
A European Commission analysis shared with Bloomberg News and reported by Staffing Industry Analysts broke the broader risk down: around 560,000 jobs are at risk this year from energy costs alone, with a further 600,000 threatened by global competition. Volkswagen’s confirmed 100,000 job cuts sit within that larger projection.
The EU has taken some action: tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports were imposed in 2024, and higher steel import tariffs followed in June. Chinese hybrid car imports rose 45% by value in January and February 2026, per Soapbox Trade citing Eurostat, suggesting that Chinese exporters are already rotating product categories to maintain market share. Beijing has not been quiet either, threatening “resolute countermeasures” via the state-owned Xinhua agency if the EU escalates further.
Julius’s core argument is that Brussels keeps treating the symptoms: job losses in car plants, in steel mills, in chemical facilities. It is not yet treating what he calls the virus, which is Chinese penetration at component level across 90% of EU manufacturing. The October deadline for the EU-China trade talks will be the first real test of whether that changes. My read is that it will not be enough, and that EU manufacturing job cuts will keep compounding long after the coffins have been packed away.
