Volkswagen and Porsche
In total, Volkswagen will pay out 9.55 billion euros to shareholders.
(Photo: dpa)
Rain of money for the Volkswagen shareholders: At the beginning of January, the Wolfsburg-based car manufacturer distributed an additional 9.55 billion euros to its shareholders, above all to the Porsche and Piech families. VW is proposing a special dividend of EUR 19.06 per share, according to the invitation to the extraordinary general meeting on December 16 in Berlin published on Friday.
As promised, the group is passing on 49 percent of the income from the successful IPO of the sports car subsidiary Porsche AG. The family holding company Porsche SE, which is controlled by the descendants of the company founder Ferdinand Porsche, can count on three billion euros, which it intends to invest immediately in additional ordinary shares in Porsche AG.
The special dividend is due on January 9, 2023, as stated in the AGM invitation. The distribution is the prerequisite for Porsche SE to increase its ordinary shareholding in Porsche AG from 17.5 percent to 25 percent. Financially, it’s a zero-sum game: The 7.5 percent package that the holding company takes over from Volkswagen costs as much as it earns from the dividend. Porsche SE had financed the first tranche with debt. The families thus regain direct access to the Stuttgart sports car manufacturer, which they had to sell after the failed attempt to take over Volkswagen.
The approval of the shareholders is considered a formality: Porsche AG holds the majority of the ordinary shares with voting rights. And the other two major Volkswagen shareholders also benefit massively: the state of Lower Saxony (11.8 percent) collects 1.13 billion euros, the state holding company of Qatar (10.5 percent) one billion. That’s more than half the amount that Qatar put into Porsche AG shares when it went public.
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In total, Porsche’s IPO – the largest in Germany for more than 25 years – and the sale of shares to the Volkswagen family holding company will bring in more than 19 billion euros. The part of the money that the Wolfsburg group keeps should flow into the conversion of Volkswagen into an electric car manufacturer.
The Extraordinary General Meeting is the first in three years that Volkswagen intends to hold in person again. The group has rented the Berlin congress center “CityCube” for this purpose. Since 2020, the shareholders’ meetings – like almost all listed companies – have only taken place virtually due to the corona pandemic.
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