“Great exertion”
VW announces efficiency program at core brand
6/14/2023 3:33 p.m
Europe’s largest carmaker wants to overhaul its strategy. The core brand alone is expected to earn ten billion euros more by 2026. Significantly more should be left behind per car sold. As a precautionary measure, the works council warns that the standard pay and agreements made should be maintained.
The car manufacturer Volkswagen wants to trim its core brand for efficiency in the next few years. The aim is to improve the operating result by ten billion euros by 2026 and to double the return to 6.5 percent. “We are starting a major, joint effort to lead the VW brand to new strengths and to position it robustly for the future,” announced brand boss Thomas Schäfer at the works meeting at the main plant in Wolfsburg. Milestones of a program are to be worked out and approved together with the employee representatives by October.
Works council chief Daniela Cavallo emphasized that the savings should be achieved without cutting back on standard pay or job security. She called for a “convincing interlocking of the strategically crucial fields of group management, cooperation between the brands, focus on software and product quality.”
The new guidelines for the Volkswagen core brand are part of a general overhaul of the Group’s strategy, which CEO Oliver Blume intends to present at an investor conference on June 21. With savings and more synergy effects through closer cooperation between the group brands, he wants to increase the profitability of Europe’s largest car group.
In the past two years, the core brand VW has not achieved much more than three percent return. In view of the difficult market environment, the Wolfsburg-based company wants to make investments and secure jobs with more profit. Schäfer wants to make VW more efficient, faster and more powerful across all areas of the company. Administrative processes were to be streamlined, production more efficient, the model range streamlined and equipment variants reduced.
Low-volume models such as the VW Arteon should no longer have successors. With the e-car ID.7, there are already 99 percent fewer configuration options than with the comparable combustion engine model Golf 7. In addition, the company wants to optimize the capacity utilization of its plants worldwide in order to increase profitability and be able to react more flexibly to fluctuations in demand and the market.