The biggest excitement in the automotive industry these weeks is coming from Brussels. Last week, import tariffs for Chinese electric cars were decided there, and this week there may be a tough conflict between the Volkswagen Group and its employees. After Audi has announced the closure of its Brussels factory, the powerful works council members in the group formed themselves – and not just by voting unanimously against the elimination on the Audi supervisory board.
References to the legendary struggles of Belgian workers are already circulating; At Ford in Ghent, they warmed themselves photogenically by the metal of a bodyshell that had been carried from the assembly line to the factory gate and was cheerfully kept under fire. Some of this may be saber rattling, but if you can successfully thwart a factory closure anywhere, it would be in Belgium. The “Renault Law” has been in place there for 25 years, forcing employers to more or less obtain the consent of their employees when closing plants. Let’s see where the agreement lies: will there remain high severance payments or – just to put it in perspective – will there be a new components factory in the old car factory.
Ten days ago, Martin Sander officially started as VW sales manager. The employees already knew what to expect because Sander had more or less told them his maxim from his home office: “Everything we do has to be world-class. If it’s not that, it’s not good enough.” It won’t be easy for the brand to live up to its claim. Once again VW – Sander since July 1st – has to sell some models longer than planned. Central models such as the ID.Golf have now been pushed back so far by the board that the Golf 8 will be ten (!) years old when it gets a successor, as my colleagues Michael Freitag and Christoph Seyerlein have researched. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: significant parts of the VW model range are delayed, sometimes by several years.
It fits into the picture that too the sales figures for the second quarter are lousy: VW minus 5.2 percent, Audi minus 11.3, group-wide minus 3.8. The evening before last, the group also lowered its earnings forecast for the full year; The operating return on sales should be half a percentage point lower than previously promised: 6.5 to 7 percent.
Heads: Wang Chuanfu ++ Robert Habeck
Shortly before the factory holidays, many other manufacturers alongside Volkswagen are releasing their sales figures for the first half of the year. This is routine due to the calendar, but you could also say: They quickly clear the air so that the bad news can sink in over the summer.
This is how (former) model boy sold BMW In the first half of the year, there were 1.2 million cars across the group, 0.1 percent fewer than in the previous year. The corporate brands Mini and Rolls-Royce lost visibly. The BMW brand itself reported a significant increase in electric cars and, after changing the model of the 5 Series, also found more buyers for its more expensive cars.
Mercedes looked much worse: the high-margin luxury class models also contributed to the 6 percent drop to almost 960,000 cars, which can only partially be explained by the change in the G-Class. Stuttgart’s well-known electrical weakness also continued.
Things looked similar at Porsche, at least at first glance: The sales decline of 6.8 percent also went into the accounts of the Panamera and the electric Taycan, which are due for a facelift. The situation in China was downright dramatic: the brand’s sales fell by a third.
And finally back to Volkswagen, which is keeping us very busy today: A court in Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga has also sentenced the company to pay millions. After the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Wolfsburg-based company shut down a joint project with their Russian partner Gaz. He would now receive the equivalent of 177 million euros in compensation
, if the judgment becomes final.
More mobility: Boeing ++ Space travel ++ Hapag ++ HHLA
People have somehow gotten used to the idea that Boeing aircraft have apparently only been roughly put together in recent years and are no longer assembled with proud precision. In this respect, the following news is now (almost) no longer surprising: Of the 2,612 registered in the USA, 737 were of different years of construction It is necessary to check whether the oxygen generators for the emergency masks are still in the correct places. Apparently they can slip during flight operations and the passengers would then have no oxygen.
Europe is back in space after a year-long forced break. After a largely successful test flight of the Ariane 6
The rocket’s first commercial flights are scheduled to launch before New Year’s Eve. However, it is ready for series production four years late. The rocket is also more expensive than Elon Musk’s Space-X, but more flexible. The main customer for the first 30 launches is Amazon.
When investors defended themselves against a $56 billion pay package for Tesla boss Elon Musk six months ago, their sympathies were largely on their side. The attempted grab into the cash register seemed self-aggrandizing because Tesla is clearly groaning under an outdated model range and an empty product pipeline, while Chief Executive Zampano gambles away his billions on sideshows and scares away some of his regular customers with political statements.
But now the plaintiffs’ representatives have suddenly turned the sympathy bonus from their supposed David versus Goliath role into the opposite: The three law firms involved are demanding $7 billion for their work and derive the fee claim from the value in dispute. The average hourly rate of the 37 lawyers, employees and legal officers involved would then be $370,000, which gave Tesla lawyer John Reed the opportunity to mock the “real lawyer joke” and offer a comparatively measly $13.6 million.
Have a good week.
Yours, Henning Hinze
Do you have any wishes, suggestions or information that we should take care of journalistically? You can reach my colleagues in the Mobility team and me at manage.mobility@manager-magazin.de
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