Due to Porsche’s IPO in early September, the Volkswagen Group needs to convene an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders approve special dividends for investors. The VW Group and Porsche CEO Oliver Blume used the meeting to discuss what he and his teams did in the first 100 days in power and his plans to bring the group together. move in a more profitable direction. That profit isn’t simply money either — he wants to maximize the power of the brands on the team as part of growing sales and profits. “Nothing and nobody is more important than the brand. People buy the brand,” he said. “They are one of the most important criteria for our customers. That’s why we will position our brand even more effectively and sharpen their profile even more.”
Blume says this strategy requires removing overlap. He told the audience that “significantly revised product strategies” would lead to “clear design language … to increase product recognition.” We’ve heard this before, conceptual difference always seems to reduce to incremental change by the time sheet metal production is approved. The only exception is Seat, the latest line-up that is vastly different when compared to the models in the Seat line-up and when compared to the Volkswagen models on which Seat builds its lineup. Design initiatives will roll as VW’s Scalable Systems Platform grows rapidly across the group’s brands over the next seven years.
Even more breathing space will come from individual brands-specific output bands. Blume’s translated words are, “we have distributed the scope of authority to the brand teams so that there is no future duplication.” We’d like to see a chart for this; Are the brands grouped into something like mainstream, mass, and luxury? As in the case, wouldn’t Seat and Skoda be separated from each other, the two sharing an output range that wouldn’t violate Volkswagen’s primary branding? Or do all three have their own non-overlapping power ranges? And does this apply to ICE and EV powertrains? Either way, it seems likely that at least one set of the brand’s customers will be asked to give up power. Call us crazy, but we suspect it won’t be Porsche customers. Or maybe everyone is going up!
The undeniably good news for everyone is that Blume says there’s a new quality strike at work. The effort involves hardware and software, the initiative was mentioned last month in interviews with the head of the Volkswagen brand Thomas Schäfer on VW . infotainment system. Additionally, with the software being a fault of the VW Group since before ID.3, Blume said creating the in-house CARIAD software unit was a step in the right direction, and it’s also at the heart of the company. improvement efforts. The benefits will mean better software in general, an EV driving range of up to 700 km on the WLTP cycle, and fast charging up to 200 kW. A glimpse into the future comes with the launch of “a high-performance software for [the] luxury brands next year.”
The entire speech outlined ten initiatives distilled from “75 areas of action”, each overseen by a member of the VW Group’s board of directors. You can read Blume’s speech yourself thisor watch translation video.
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