Stuttgartruns on a handful of strong industries. If you’re job-hunting or weighing a move, here’s where the opportunities (and the big-name employers) are.
Top industries & employers
Automotive manufacturers
Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Daimler Truck
Mercedes-Benz builds in Untertürkheim and Sindelfingen and Porsche in Zuffenhausen — both inside the city. Stuttgart is the only place on earth where two globally famous carmakers were founded within a few kilometres of each other.
Automotive supply & industrial technology
Bosch, Mahle, Eberspächer, Behr, Dürr
Bosch is headquartered in Gerlingen on the city's edge and is the world's largest automotive supplier. The regional supply chain is deep, highly paid, and currently absorbing the shift away from the combustion engine.
Machine tools, lasers & precision engineering
Trumpf (Ditzingen), Festo (Esslingen), Stihl (Waiblingen), Kärcher (Winnenden)
The Mittelstand belt around Stuttgart contains an unusual density of world market leaders in narrow categories — laser cutting, pneumatics, chainsaws, pressure washers — most of them family-owned and in small towns.
Software, AI & IT services
IBM Deutschland (Ehningen), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (Böblingen), Vector Informatik, Cyber Valley
The Cyber Valley initiative links Stuttgart and Tübingen into one of Europe's larger machine-learning research clusters, and automotive software houses such as Vector employ heavily in the region.
Finance & insurance
LBBW, Wüstenrot & Württembergische, Allianz Leben, Börse Stuttgart
Landesbank Baden-Württemberg is one of Germany's largest state banks, and Börse Stuttgart is the country's second stock exchange and its main retail securities venue.
Research institutes & universities
University of Stuttgart, Universität Hohenheim, Fraunhofer IPA and IAO, Max Planck for Intelligent Systems, DLR
One of Germany's densest concentrations of applied research, weighted heavily toward production engineering, robotics and materials — which is why so much industrial R&D is done here rather than in a corporate lab elsewhere.
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