After weeks of power struggle, the VW supervisory board and works council buried the hatchet. Herbert Diess remains CEO, but has to give up some power and is given a new focus. That was decided by the supervisory board of the car manufacturer yesterday, Thursday.
Accordingly, in the future, Diess will primarily take care of strategic issues at VW, such as the new Cariad software division. He should retain control of the volume brands as a whole.
In addition, the head of the core Volkswagen brand, Ralf Brandstätter, will be promoted to the Board of Management. From August 2022, Brandstätter will be responsible for the important and recently significantly weaker China business that was previously assigned to Diess. Skoda boss Thomas Schäfer is to take over responsibility for the main brand VW Passenger Cars on the group board. As of February 1st, Hauke Stars will join the top committee as board member for the newly created IT and organization department and Audi manager Hildegard Wortmann will be responsible for sales. This increases the number of members to eleven.
In the background, there is still a gripe in the Volkswagen Group about the “pearl of returns” Porsche. According to a report in the Handelsblatt, the group is working on a possible IPO of the sports car subsidiary.
What are the VW owners planning?
VW intends to use the proceeds to finance digitization and the transformation towards e-mobility. Spicy: The VW owners, the Porsche and Piëch families, are considering buying a significant block of shares from Porsche and are considering the sale of parts of their VW stake. The families hold 53.3 percent of VW shares. It is even conceivable that the families could hand over the majority to VW, it said in the report – but in this case they should remain the largest shareholder ahead of the state of Lower Saxony (20 percent).
According to reports, the owner families want to regain more access to the Porsche brand – which came under the corporate umbrella of VW in the course of the takeover battle between Porsche and Volkswagen in the 2008/2009 financial crisis and thus lost its independence.
Source: Nachrichten
