Coindu Walks Up to 493 of Its 752 Joane Famalicão Workers Into a Six-Month Phased Lay-Off Running May to November 2026 — Another Print for Portugal's 2026 Auto-Components Ledger After Bosch, Husqvarna, Yazaki and Enercon

The textile-components manufacturer Coindu has communicated to its workforce — in the week of 12 May 2026 — a six-month phased lay-off at its plant in Joane, Vila Nova de Famalicão, that the company itself frames as potentially reaching up to 493 of its current 752 employees. The lay-off window opens in May 2026 and runs through November 2026. The suspension will not hit every affected worker on the same day: Coindu explicitly says it will move "in a phased, gradual manner and according to work needs," area by area, with selection criteria the company calls "objective, social and operational."

What was announced

Two numbers carry the print. 493 is the maximum potential pool of workers who can be placed on suspended-contract status under Portugal's lay-off regime over the six-month window. 752 is the current Coindu headcount at Joane after a 2025 round of restructuring. The two figures together imply that roughly two-thirds of the plant's payroll is now inside a contingency that the company can pull on between now and 30 November 2026, with the timing left to "work needs." The selection, Coindu told employees, will fall on workers "without effective occupation" or whose specific sector is the one carrying the order shortfall in any given month.

The legal instrument here is the Portuguese lay-off figure under the Código do Trabalho — a temporary suspension of work contracts that preserves the employment link while reducing salary obligations, with Social Security covering part of the wage floor. It is the same instrument the country leaned on heavily through 2020-2021 and that Parliament has reformed twice in the last twelve months. It is not a dismissal: workers stay on the payroll, accrue seniority, and return to the line when orders return.

Coindu's stated reasons

The company's communication to staff lists four drivers. The first is the global tariff turbulence around US and China import duties — the same trade backdrop that has reshaped European automotive supply-chain forecasting since the spring of 2025 and that, on the customer side, has already pulled Tesla's Portuguese registrations down 32.8% in April. The second is the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, which Coindu cites as eroding "confidence" in the automotive demand curve. The third is what the company calls "a reduction of orders from the automotive sector," visible in its own order book. The fourth is the line Coindu uses to describe its own balance sheet — "temporary excess of personnel and financial pressure" — which puts the lay-off in the category of cash-management measure rather than restructuring per se.

The company has not named the customer programmes that thinned the order book. Coindu's business is the supply of seat-cover and interior-textile assemblies into European OEM lines, a tier-one position that means its workload tracks model-by-model build-rate decisions made by its automaker customers months upstream.

What 2025 already took out of Joane

The 12 May print is not Coindu's first contact with downsizing this cycle. In 2025, the same Joane plant ran a collective-dismissal process that removed 123 workers from the payroll, and earlier reporting placed a further lay-off cohort across the same year. The plant headcount that today sits at 752 is therefore already the post-contraction figure, not the pre-contraction one — the 2026 lay-off lands on a workforce already reduced from the levels Coindu carried through the 2022-2023 peak. Industry filings from that period put the company's combined Portuguese workforce above two thousand, across multiple sites, before the order-book reset that started in 2024.

The recovery date Coindu is willing to put on paper

The 2027 line is the part of the communication that matters most to anyone trying to read the lay-off as either a stay-of-execution or a soft prelude to a second collective dismissal. Coindu states that it expects "activity recovery in 2027" and grounds that expectation in projects it has already secured. In a six-month lay-off, the recovery date is the single fact that determines whether suspended contracts are reactivated or whether the file eventually rolls forward into a redundancy. The company has chosen to put 2027 in writing.

Where this sits in Portugal's 2026 industrial ledger

The Coindu print does not arrive into an empty page. The first five months of 2026 have already produced one of the heaviest sequences of manufacturing-footprint reductions Portugal has carried in a single calendar window in years. Bosch Braga is mid-way through a 2,500-person lay-off ending April 2026. Yazaki Saltano opened a 163-position collective dismissal at its Ovar plant in January. Enercon shut its Viana do Castelo wind-turbine factory in February (68 jobs). Husqvarna confirmed on 6 May the end-of-2026 closure of its Rio de Mouro stone-diamond-tools site in Sintra (approximately 100 Portuguese jobs in a 200-person multi-country exit). Coindu's six-month suspension at Joane is the largest single contingency print of the lot in raw-headcount terms, although the lay-off mechanism makes it conceptually different from the collective-dismissal files Bosch, Yazaki and Husqvarna are running.

Famalicão sits inside the Ave river-valley industrial corridor — the textile-and-components belt that runs from Vila Nova de Famalicão through Guimarães and Vizela into Braga and that has carried the bulk of Portugal's tier-one automotive-supply footprint for the last two decades. Joane is a textile parish by tradition: Coindu's presence in the freguesia put automotive seat-and-interior assembly on top of an already-existing textile labour pool. The 2026 lay-off lands inside the part of the country where the automotive-components order-book contraction is felt most directly, in a parish where a single employer's headcount decision can move local hiring data.

What workers carry into the next six months

Under the Portuguese lay-off regime as it currently stands after the 2025 reforms, a worker placed in suspended-contract status receives two-thirds of normal remuneration, with Social Security covering a defined share of the floor and the employer covering the balance. Seniority continues to accrue. Holiday and Christmas allowances continue to accrue on the lay-off floor. The worker may take on a second activity during the suspension. The employment relationship is preserved, and the line into the same job at the same plant remains open until the company either reactivates the contract or escalates into a dismissal file. The 30 November 2026 date is therefore the next inflection point on the Coindu calendar — earlier if order activity recovers ahead of schedule, later if the company applies to extend.

Sources: company communication to workers via Lusa (12 May 2026), Jornal de Negócios (12 May 2026), ECO (12 May 2026), Notícias ao Minuto (12 May 2026).