BMW’s Autumn of Recalibration: New Leadership, Record Range, and a Stock Still Climbing Out of a Hole

The BMW share price has spent much of 2025 in recovery mode, and the closing bell on Friday offered another modest step in that direction. The stock finished the session at €62.90, up 1.6% on the day — a gain that leaves it roughly 12% above the 52-week low of €56.40 touched in July, though still nursing a 33% deficit since the start of January.

That year-to-date decline is the lingering residue of a bruising early summer, when a profit warning and the sharp slowdown in China rattled investor confidence. But the market’s mood has been gradually shifting. Over the past month, the shares have added 5.4%, and the recovery has been building for longer than that: since the company’s restructuring plans first surfaced around a month ago, the equity has climbed 5.8%, with a further 3.7% gain accumulating since the half-year results landed.

The backdrop to that tentative rally is a company in the midst of its most significant operational and managerial overhaul in years. At the helm of the personnel side of that transformation is a newcomer. Dorothea von Boxberg stepped into the BMW AG board on 1 September as labour director, taking over from Ilka Horstmeier. Von Boxberg arrives with an aviation pedigree — she previously served as CEO of Brussels Airlines and held leadership roles at Lufthansa AG and Lufthansa Cargo — and inherits a portfolio that will oversee the largest workforce reduction the company has undertaken in recent memory.

The numbers attached to that programme are stark. Roughly 8,000 positions are slated to disappear by 2027 through a voluntary severance scheme that gets underway in October. Of the company’s approximately 154,000 employees worldwide, around 85,000 are based in Germany, and it is there that more than half of the cuts are expected to land. The company has stressed that the reductions will be achieved without compulsory redundancies.

Von Boxberg’s appointment is the second significant change to the boardroom this year. Dr. Raymond Wittmann has been a production board member since 13 May, when Milan Nedeljković — who previously ran that division — moved up to the group’s top job. With two of the most critical portfolios, personnel and production, now in new hands within a matter of months, the leadership team is being reshaped just as the company pushes through its cost-saving programme and accelerates its electric vehicle rollout.

That operational push continues apace even as the workforce shrinks. In Regensburg, the company introduced a new manufacturing process at the start of September, in which the high-voltage battery is now joined to the body at the very beginning of final assembly — a departure from the previous sequence, where the drive unit was installed first. New pre-assembly energy modules, supported by a high-bay warehouse, are designed to safeguard daily production output.

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The model at the centre of BMW’s electric ambitions is the iX3, and the signs are encouraging. Reports suggest the vehicle is closing in on 100,000 orders, with 50,000 units already built at the Debrecen plant in Hungary. The model’s importance was underscored by a recent range test in Portugal, where the Neue Klasse vehicle reportedly covered 739 kilometres and still had 20% battery charge remaining — a figure that bolsters the technology’s credentials as the company’s flagship platform.

The i3, meanwhile, is also gathering momentum. The 2027 model has been in series production in Munich since last month, with the regular 3 Series expected to follow at Dingolfing by the end of the year. Pre-orders for the i3’s Launch Edition have been open since June, and the standard sales launch is scheduled for late September. In Europe, deliveries of battery-electric vehicles rose 38.0% in the second quarter, propelled by the iX3 ramp-up.

The facelifted 7 Series and i7 are also part of the autumn offensive, with an India launch set for 11 September and pre-orders already running since early August. Before that market debut, BMW deployed both models as VIP shuttles at the Frieze Seoul art fair this week, with a fleet of 20 vehicles in service until Saturday — a deliberate move to position the refreshed models in high-profile settings ahead of the broader market rollout.

Analysts have taken note of the improving picture. Deutsche Bank Research reaffirmed its buy recommendation with a €90 price target in early September, while Bernstein Research had lodged its “outperform” rating with an €82 target a few days earlier. The stock’s technical position has also firmed: Friday’s close leaves the shares about 6.2% above their 50-day moving average, although they remain roughly 18% below the 200-day average of €76.69.

For investors, the leadership changes may ultimately signal continuity as much as renewal. With Wittmann and von Boxberg in place, CEO Nedeljković has his key lieutenants installed for the journey toward the end of the decade, when the company aims to have its operating margin back in the 8% to 10% corridor. The model offensive and the Neue Klasse’s technical progress are the levers that will need to do the heavy lifting between now and then — and the stock’s slow climb off its lows suggests the market is willing to watch how that story unfolds.