Porsche/VW Saga

[EnI]

The Emperor (Piech) has unexpectedly been defeated. Darth Vader (Winterkorn) is here to stay, even beyond 2016:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...p-backs-ceo-winterkorn-against-chairman-piech

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/17/us-volkswagen-ceo-succession-idUSKBN0N80LM20150417

 

[Mick Briesgau]

No one of the board was prepared to follow Piëch. Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(FAZ.net)

 

[EnI]

OMG! THE EMEPROR IS... GONE! So is his wife. What will happen to the Empire? Darth Vader is the big winner here. What will wounded, defeated and humiliated Emperor do now? Seek revenge?




http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/25/us-volkswagen-ceo-chairman-idUSKBN0NG0N720150425

Business | Sat Apr 25, 2015 12:20pm EDT

Volkswagen Chairman Piech resigns after failing to oust CEO

FRANKFURT

(Reuters) - Volkswagen's (VOWG_p.DE) supervisory board Chairman Ferdinand Piech unexpectedly resigned on Saturday after losing a showdown he provoked with Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn.

Piech, a dominant figure at VW for more than two decades and the grandson of the inventor of the VW Beetle, also resigned as member of the supervisory board and any other mandates within the Volkswagen group with immediate effect, Volkswagen said.

The leadership row at VW burst into the open this month when Der Spiegel quoted Piech, the 78-year-old patriarch of the family that owns 51 percent of voting rights in VW, as saying he had "distanced" himself from Winterkorn.

The comment came at a time when VW is cutting billions of euros of costs and revamping structures to boost profitability, having struggled with underperformance in the United States and declining profitability at its core autos division.

Tensions between Piech and Winterkorn appeared to have eased a week ago when senior supervisory board members backed the CEO, leaving Piech isolated in a five-to-one vote and forcing him to agree to a joint statement supporting Winterkorn.

But sources said at the time he would have faced calls for his own resignation had he not backed the CEO.

Deputy Chairman Berthold Huber will temporarily assume leadership of the board until the election of a new chairman, Volkswagen said, adding that Piech's wife Ursula had also resigned from her mandates at the group.

 

[Giannis]

Wow!

I wouldn't expect him to resign like that, I thought there would be some sort of round 2. I don't thing that F.P. will let that go that easily, though..

 

[Mick Briesgau]

This is not good for VAG

 

[SCOTT27]

Execute Order 66.

 

[kingjr9000]

So what's going to happen to the rest of vag? Are we going to see anything else like the veyron and 918 again since they're cutting costs?

 

[Giannis]

The first thing I hope they'll cut under the new managing, is the front quarterpanel of the Golf VII. It's driving me crazy.

Next up the list, is the cross versions of all VWs, the front overhang of Audi's sedans and the price of the Cayman GT4 so that I can afford one.

 

[hoffmeister_fan]

Wow. Egomaniacal as he is, there's no question the level of influence he has had in the auto industry.

The MQB platform was supposed to be VW's golden goose that laid the golden egg, however, I heard some rumbling that's not how it's playing out. Is that true or is it nonsense?

 

[kingjr9000]

This is long.
As Boardroom Struggle Ends, Volkswagen Looks to the Future


By JACK EWINGAPRIL 26, 2015

Photo

On Saturday, Volkswagen said in a statement that Ferdinand Piëch would resign. CreditJulian Stratenschulte, European Press Agency

Volkswagen’s Chairman, Ferdinand Piëch, Is Ousted in Power StruggleAPRIL 25, 2015
FRANKFURT — Ferdinand Piëch inspired many stories, and one comes from many years ago, when he noticed that cars on display at the Volkswagendealership in Salzburg, Austria, were covered in snow.

It snows often in Salzburg. But Mr. Piëch — whose extended family, the Porsches, owns the dealership there and occupies a compound nearby — was not pleased. Since then, the story goes, no flake of snow has been allowed to linger on any Golf or Passat at the lot in Salzburg.

• 
  The anecdote, told by Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, a university professor and former employee of Porsche, the maker of sports cars, says much about the character of the man who dominated Volkswagen for decades until he resigned on Saturday as chairman of its supervisory board.
  
  Mr. Piëch had sought to force out Martin Winterkorn as Volkswagen’s chief executive. But Mr. Winterkorn, 67, refused to go and other members of the supervisory board rallied behind him, handing Mr. Piëch, who is 78, a shocking defeat.
  
  
  Mr. Piëch was exacting, willful, feared by subordinates and obsessive about his company’s products. He was also remarkably successful, leading Volkswagen from near bankruptcy in the early 1990s to No. 2 automaker in the world, after Toyota. Like Steve Jobs at Apple, Mr. Piëch was among a handful of executives whose personal stamp was unmistakable on the companies they ran.
  
  Mr. Piëch’s departure resolves an internal power struggle at Volkswagen but not the formidable challenges that the automaker faces, including slim profits, dwindling market share in the United States and an organization that critics say has become bloated and inefficient.
  
  Volkswagen earns a profit of just 6 percent on sales, compared with about 9 percent for Toyota. And most of Volkswagen’s earnings come from its high-end brands. The Porsche division, with sales last year of about 200,000 vehicles, earned more than Volkswagen-brand cars with sales of more than 6 million.
  
  With Mr. Piëch gone, there are likely to be some who question the business logic of the automaking empire he built. Volkswagen manufactures everything from Skodas that sell for less than 9,000 euros ($9,600), to Bugatti super sports cars that sell for more than $1 million. The company, based in Wolfsburg, Germany, also makes MAN and Scania trucks, Ducati motorcycles, Bentley luxury cars, and Lamborghini sports cars.
  
  
  “A lot of his obsessions were distractions that cost money,” Karl Brauer, a senior analyst at the automotive research company Kelley Blue Book, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. Volkswagen’s size could still prove to be an advantage, Mr. Brauer said, because the company benefits from efforts to share components among its wide array of vehicles.
  
  But the loss of the Volkswagen patriarch also raises the question of whether anyone, even the formidable Mr. Winterkorn, will bring the same resolve and attention to detail.
  
  “Most people would say Piëch got the company going in a direction that made it one of the biggest car companies in the world,” Mr. Brauer said. “He has to be given credit for that.”
  
  Volkswagen may also need to cut costs more aggressively, especially in Germany, a difficult task for a company that is 20 percent owned by the government of the state of Lower Saxony, and where labor unions exert strong influence.
  
  Berthold Huber, former president of the IG Metall labor union and a member of the Volkswagen supervisory board, is serving as acting chairman of the company until a permanent successor to Mr. Piëch is named. That is the equivalent of the president of the United Auto Workers overseeing Ford or General Motors.
  
  Though Toyota produces more cars than Volkswagen, it has far fewer employees. Part of the discrepancy reflects the fact that Volkswagen produces more of its own components, like brake discs and seats, than Toyota, which buys more parts from outside suppliers. But the high number of employees is also a reflection of how hard it is to shrink the work force in Germany.
  
  In Europe, Volkswagen is by far the biggest carmaker. All its brands together command a 23 percent market share in the European Union, more than double that of PSA Peugeot Citroën, the No. 2 automaker in Europe. But the European market, though recovering, does not offer the same long-term potential for growth as China, the United States and Latin America.
  
  In much of the rest of the world, Volkswagen is struggling. In the United States, the second-biggest auto market after China, sales of all Volkswagen brands fell 2 percent last year, to about 600,000 cars, even as the overall market grew.
  
  The company sold about 370,000 cars with the Volkswagen brand, fewer than Subaru, which has traditionally been considered a niche player.
  
  The decline in the United States is particularly embarrassing for Volkswagen because it has made a concerted effort to increase its market share, investing $1 billion to build a plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., where it manufactures Passat sedans.
  
  Sales in China, Volkswagen’s largest market, have also showed signs of slowing, rising just 2 percent in the first quarter for all brands. Worldwide, sales rose 2 percent in the quarter, but the growth came from Audi, Porsche and Skoda.
  
  Sales of cars with the Volkswagen emblem slipped 1.3 percent, suggesting that the core brand is losing sales to its siblings — Skoda at the low end of the market and Audi at the high end.
  
  Even after giving up control of daily operations in 2002, when he ceded the post of chief executive to become chairman of the supervisory board, Mr. Piëch continued to set the tone at Volkswagen. His power also derived from the Porsche family, which owns more than 50 percent of the voting shares.
  
  Of the remaining company shares, Lower Saxony has 20 percent and the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar has 17 percent. Only 12 percent of Volkswagen shares trade on the stock market, which meant that Mr. Piëch and his handpicked cadre of top managers did not need to pay much attention to fund managers, bank analysts or financial journalists.
  
  Mr. Piëch was often accused of empire building at the expense of profit. It was telling that when Mr. Piëch lost faith in Mr. Winterkorn, the chief executive, he bypassed the supervisory board and told the German magazine Der Spiegel that he was distancing himself from his onetime protégé.
  
  
  Mr. Piëch seems to have believed that he could get rid of Mr. Winterkorn by undermining him publicly. But for once he miscalculated. Mr. Winterkorn won the support of Volkswagen employees, the government of Lower Saxony, and the rest of the Porsche family. Mr. Piëch, along with his wife, Ursula, who also had a seat on the board, resigned.
  
  Mr. Piëch, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, who designed a car for Hitler that would later be known as the Beetle and founded the company that produces Porsche sports cars, often had tense relations with his cousins, but had managed, until Saturday, to outmaneuver them.
  
  With Mr. Piëch gone, there could be a power vacuum at Volkswagen, and instability as the shareholders and top managers argue about strategy.
  
  There could be calls to dismantle some of the empire that Mr. Piëch built. Some shareholders or members of the Porsche family — even Mr. Piëch — could decide the time is right to cash out.
  
  “Volkswagen is back now where it was 15 years ago,” Mr. Dudenhöffer, the professor and former Porsche employee, said on Sunday. “Maybe next year there will be snow on the cars in Salzburg again.”
  

 

[Mr. Mercedes]

Throw in the bribery and prostitution claims of a few years ago and you could make a brilliant movie out of this! Wolf of Wolfsburg?