The public is enlightened! It will sell off brands such as Bugatti and Ducati, and its profitability is expected to surpass Toyota
As we all know, the Volkswagen Group is one of the largest automobile groups in the world, with 11 brands under it, including Volkswagen, Skoda, and Audi. Everyone is familiar with it, there are joint ventures in production in China. Everyone has heard of Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, and Bugatti. After all, everyone dreams of owning one. I have rarely heard of the rest, Ducati, Scania, Seat, and MAN heavy trucks.
Among them, the Italian supercar brand Lamborghini was acquired by Audi in 1998. In addition, the Italian motorcycle manufacturer, which has countless championship halos and race trophies, was also acquired by Audi in 2012. Audi directly leads the development of these two car brands, and of course the Volkswagen Group has great command power. Bugatti entered the Volkswagen Group in 1998.
Although the Volkswagen Group's sales have surpassed Toyota's in the past many years, ranking first in the world, its profits are far less than Toyota, which only has six sub-brands. The main reason is that many of Volkswagen's brands have suffered serious losses and their products have poor profitability. Under the global strategy, only a few brands such as Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche have achieved profitability. On the other hand, efficiency and low cost are too high. As of the end of 2019, the Volkswagen Group had 671,205 employees, much higher than Toyota's 359,542 employees in the same period.
Among the many sub-brands of the Volkswagen Group, Ducati is the only two-wheeled vehicle business, and the two ultra-luxury brands Bugatti and Lamborghini are the smallest compared to Porsche, Audi and Bentley. of. What's more important is that their R&D and production synergies with the group's mainstream brands are not strong, so it is difficult to share costs.
In addition to pursuing economies of scale and financing, increasingly stringent emission regulations have forced the Volkswagen Group to find ways to reduce carbon emissions and spend a lot of money to develop low-emission models while accelerating the development of electric vehicles. pace of change. EU lawmakers have proposed cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 50% by 2030, which will leave the Volkswagen Group facing a short-term investment crunch.
The Volkswagen Group is in the stage of electric transformation. If these fringe brands want to keep up with the trend, they are bound to transform. However, it is not cost-effective to invest huge sums of money in developing exclusive electric platforms for them alone. Therefore, The future of these niche brands in the group must be re-examined. Group CEO Diess emphasized to the media at last year's Frankfurt Auto Show that the current Volkswagen Group no longer needs so many brands, and we can increase profits by deeply cultivating existing brands.
Recently, foreign media reported that the current CEO of Volkswagen Group, Diess, aims to more than double the group’s market value of 80 billion euros to 200 billion euros (approximately 235 billion euros) during his tenure. USD), this review may cause its high-performance brands such as Lamborghini, Bugatti and Ducati to face other options such as technical cooperation, restructuring, and even listing or sale.
Spinning off non-core businesses will help cut costs. It is expected that the Volkswagen Group will save 5.9 billion euros in expenses by 2023, and the operating profit margin will increase to 6. Luxury brand Bugatti will be sold to Rimac, a Croatian electric supercar company (Porsche is also one of its shareholders with a stake in Rimac 15.5), and the plan is to complete the transaction by the end of this year. The purpose is to increase its stake in Rimac to 49 and become Rimac's majority shareholder.
The company’s most famous all-electric supercar, Concept_One, once broke the world record for electric supercars to accelerate to 100 kilometers, and the new car Concept_Two released in 2018 even improved this record to 1.85 seconds. It makes electric car brands such as Tesla and Lucid unmatched.
According to foreign media reports, not only Bugatti, but also Lamborghini, Seat, Bentley and Ducati may also be under review for sale in the future.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Volkswagen can successfully "downsize" after CEO Diess takes office. However, judging from the current development trend of Volkswagen, Volkswagen needs this kind of courage to cut off its wrists, so that its profitability is expected to surpass Toyota. Otherwise, Volkswagen still has a long way to go to compete with Toyota using the sales volume model alone. What do you think about this? Welcome to leave a message for discussion.
This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.