The capital is the backdrop to the eternal low mood. In the Estrel in Berlin-Neukölln, half Bettenburg, half congress center, the crisis-plagued Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume had to explain himself to his managers at a management conference this week. In the Chancellery, on the other hand, the car summits regularly provide beautiful images, but Blume and his two board colleagues, Ola Källenius from Mercedes and Oliver Zipse from BMW, rarely achieve breakthroughs there. Things are grand in Berlin-Mitte at Gendarmenmarkt, where the car lobby association VDA resides in a magnificent Wilhelminian building. The three car bosses are only getting their positions together with such difficulty that even the end of the combustion ban after years of struggle feels more like exhaustion than triumph. Chinese look soberly at Germany What was achieved so hard in Berlin has long been seen as a structural weakness from the Chinese perspective. From a distance of thousands of kilometers, Germany’s industry is no longer viewed with impatience, but rather with sober calm. In a current survey by the Society for International Cooperation, Chinese managers in Germany diagnose a reform backlog, a low willingness to take risks and, above all, a lack of speed. There is a lack of “flexibility, speed and, above all, customer orientation,” they say soberly. What worked for a long time no longer fits today’s markets – a mental and technical upgrade is overdue. Germany is therefore in a crisis: Some are even talking about the deepest crisis since it called itself Autoland. BMW, Mercedes and VW are at a turning point, and with them a whole generation of executives who grew up with the certainty that their companies build the best cars in the world. Almost boring biographies Ola, Oliver and Oliver have more in common than the first letters of their first names: they are children of the 1960s, grew up in sheltered Western European circumstances, studied economics or engineering and went through the leadership training ground of the corporations that they lead today – straight-line, almost These are boring biographies. After the BMW general meeting in May, Zipse hands over the wheel to production director Milan Nedeljković. And for Blume and Källenius, the coming year will be a test: their companies are so deeply in crisis that their professional futures are at stake. China’s car managers are not only faster, says a German management consultant with excellent contacts in the Chinese car industry: “They are also much more willing to take risks.” Rapid development pace, fewer testing and validation loops, focus on software: Many developers, he reports, come from consumer electronics and are used to brutally tight timing. German companies, on the other hand, as many rivals from the Far East see it, are led by incrementally thinking CEOs who have to navigate the complicated thicket of major shareholders, unions and politics. The coming year 2026 will also be characterized by the battle of corporate cultures. It will be a tough test for German corporatism – the model of state, employees and corporate management that has shaped the location for decades. Climbers from another world Behind BYD, Xiaomi, Xpeng and Geely are entrepreneurs who often grew up in humble circumstances in what was then still a bitterly poor China. Wang Chuanfu, the founder and boss of BYD, is similar in age to the German car bosses, but comes from a different world. He comes from a village in the poor province of Anhui and was raised by his siblings because his parents died early. To this day, his company sends a kind of BYD pension to all older people in the village every month. The only condition: your last name must be Wang. This is what some of the Wangs told the FAZ in the summer. BYD founder Wang ChuanfuddpThe Xiaomi founder Lei Jun dared to do what Apple CEO Tim Cook did not dare and went into the automotive industry as a technology group. This courage catapulted him into the ranking of the five richest Chinese people, and he even overtook BYD founder Wang. Lei is now the richest car entrepreneur in the world after Elon Musk. And with almost 30 million followers on Weibo, he is also likely to be the second most popular car entrepreneur on social media, even if he does not own the Chinese BYD’s cars were ridiculed for decades, but Wang persevered. Almost four years ago, BYD said goodbye to pure combustion models and became the largest electric car manufacturer in the world. The company acquired its own fleet of ships and is in the middle of a global expansion the likes of which the automotive world has never seen before. It’s a bet that can go wrong. But an entrepreneur who doesn’t have courage will soon no longer be an entrepreneur. And nowhere does this motto apply in such a pure form as in China, where the growing number of young manufacturers has long since pushed the once dominant Western rivals to the sidelines. Within less than a decade, this generation of Chinese founders has turned the global car market on its head. In the People’s Republic, by far the largest car market in the world, only two out of five cars sold were pure combustion models. “Are we delivered?” American tech blogger Marques Brownlee recently captioned a video in which he tested Xiaomi’s electric car. “Not yet,” he says in the video – at least as long as the car is not available in the United States. Organizational talent with a technocratic eye The German car bosses are as far away from the radicalism of their Chinese colleagues as Wolfsburg is from Beijing. They are also socialized very differently. VW boss Oliver Blume played football in Braunschweig, studied mechanical engineering and worked his way up step by step in the Wolfsburg car company; an organizational talent with a strong handshake and a technocratic eye. He replaced the software chaos of his predecessor Herbert Diess with partnerships and clearer processes. But the purely electric strategy of the sports car manufacturer Porsche, which Blume led in parallel with VW for a long time, turned out to be a mistake. Billions are now being invested in the further development of the combustion engine models. The Porsche and Piëch shareholder families are extremely nervous, and internally there is already talk of “appeasement” with which Blume has delayed the necessary turnaround for too long – an alarm signal for the 57-year-old manager. Because this further undermines his authority. At the turn of the year, he will be giving up his position as head of Porsche in Stuttgart and will concentrate entirely on VW in Wolfsburg. There, the strong codetermination imposes strict limits on him, and quick U-turns like those in China hardly seem possible.More on the topic Källenius has never experienced anything other than the rigid, inflexible world of large European corporations. Immediately after studying economics, including at the elite University of St. Gallen, he started at Daimler and, apart from a short visit to the McLaren motorsport racing team, spent his entire career at the traditional Stuttgart company and worked on his rise through the hierarchies to the board. The 56-year-old manager learned exactly what makes him so immobile in competition with the agile Asian competition: balancing interests. A Mercedes boss is one of the first points of contact for politicians; he has to keep investors happy as well as employees who make life difficult for him through a variety of options for exerting influence. Källenius invokes the “Swabian Speed” Källenius knows the deficits that arise for him and for Mercedes as a result of this socialization. This is one of the reasons why he repeatedly invokes the “Swabian Speed”, which is in no way inferior to the “China Speed”. But he still can’t break out of the corset: Mercedes’ decisions are too slow. Källenius was unable to set up strategies quickly and adapt them as circumstances changed. An example is not just the luxury strategy, a word that the Mercedes boss no longer uses. Källenius stuck to the one-sided focus on the top area for far too long. Nobody will accuse BMW boss Zipse of sticking to the wrong strategies for too long or making strategic decisions too slowly. But even at Bayerische Motorenwerke, which was founded in 1916, “China Speed” is still a foreign word. Zipse had a flawless career at BMW, which led him to the top job at the age of 56. Since 2019, he has steered BMW through all crises with iron discipline. Be it chip and raw material shortages or punitive tariffs in America, the people of Munich coped and are coping better than their competitors in Wolfsburg and Stuttgart. At the same time, Zipse has invested around ten billion euros in a model platform, the so-called New Class, and thus prepared the group for the future of electric and autonomous cars. No answer to the Chinese challenge But at BMW, board members should stop at the age of 60, that’s what the owner families Klatten and Quandt want. They initially made an exception for Zipse, who is now 61 years old, and approved the extension. In May, Zipse has to make way for Nedeljković, who is five years his junior. The Serbian native grew up in Ulm, loves basketball – and has had a career that is almost exactly the same as his predecessor. At BMW he is taking on a seemingly well-ordered legacy. But one can already say that Nedeljković has no answer to the challenge from China. The three models that BMW will offer from its New Class specifically for the Chinese market will be built in China, but were developed in Germany. Learning from the Chinese: VW has set up a development center including a test track in the province of Anhui. Picture Alliance The much-maligned competitor VW shows how it can be done faster. The group has set up a new development center in the Chinese city of Hefei, the “Volkswagen China Technology Company”, or VCTC for short. The engineers work in “China Speed” in the metropolis with a population of ten million, which is not far from BYD founder Wang’s home village in Anhui province. The development time is reduced by a third and the costs are to be reduced by half. Thousands of software developers sit on the VCTC campus and work on autonomous driving and digital cockpits. Experts are already talking about a “liberated laboratory” that develops vehicles for the Chinese market, independent of Wolfsburg’s constraints. Profiting from the state government A former BMW manager praised VW’s Hefei project in an interview with the F.A.Z. Things must go in the same direction for BMW in the future. But only in China. Because Chinese conditions, as Nedeljković knows as well as Blume and Källenius, cannot be transferred 1:1 to Germany. German engineers neither develop from nine in the morning to nine in the evening, nor can established corporations be run with the radicalism of a start-up founder. China’s car bosses primarily benefit from the fact that the state government in the People’s Republic has created an environment in which new car companies can be founded and incur high levels of debt. And the country already has what once defined Germany: the dense network of suppliers for everything a car needs. In this country these were once pistons and cylinder heads; in China these are now the world’s largest battery manufacturers and suppliers for self-driving cars. It is, if you will, the backdrop to the rise.
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