Dear reader,
Have you already planned your annual vacation? Maybe you’ll fly to your next break on a Condor jet with a striped look. The holiday airline could really use it because: While the travel market overall recovered well from the Corona shocks a few years ago, Condor struggled with red numbers until recently.
Condor boss Peter Gerber (61) now wants to change course with a daring strategic shift. Does a broader offering bring a brighter future? You can safely put a question mark behind this. Our topics of the week:
Topic of the week: Why the holiday airline Condor is on a crash course
The balance sheet of the holiday airline Condor in recent years certainly does not look like it has eased. However, CEO Peter Gerber assures us that the latest figures are “encouraging”. There are doubts in the industry about how much fair-weather rhetoric there is in the statement. Ex-Lufthanseat Gerber has been running the Condor business for two and a half years. He didn’t go to work at his previous employer without being disturbed. Now he is preparing to prick Lufthansa. Gerber is converting Condor from a tourist airline to an all-round airline. It is a flight forward that, in some ways, is reminiscent of its former competitor Air Berlin. He went bankrupt, and Gerber firmly rejects any parallels. My colleague Michael Machatschke shows why the new business model still raises serious doubts
.
While BYD seemed to have the ultimate turbocharger for its own growth in recent years (and perhaps even headed in the direction of Toyota), the engine of China’s number one car upstart is now sputtering. In January, the manufacturer’s sales fell by 30 percent to a good 210,000 new cars. This not only causes BYD’s shares to continue to fall; it also fuels fears of a slowdown in the overall Chinese car market.
Deepdrive: Will things finally get better again in 2026?
With regard to the German automotive industry, the answer to this question is: rather unlikely. At least that is what the vast majority of 518 managers and experts from the industry who were surveyed by Porsche Consulting assume. After an already tough previous year, almost 90 percent expect sales to continue to decline. Restructuring is becoming the survival principle of an entire industry; almost all respondents are concerned with it. Is there also reason for optimism? Things are looking poor in the core business, which is why 81 percent are pinning their hopes on growth from new sectors. There are more details here
.
The more difficult the situation at home becomes, the more important expansion is likely to become for Chinese automobile manufacturers. In some places their push into the wide world is viewed with suspicion. The Polish Ministry of Defense
is now taking drastic measures: out of concern about espionage through cameras, sensors and online services in the vehicles, Chinese-made cars should no longer be allowed to move around military installations and be allowed to park near strategically important points. Which breakwaters for the “Chinese car tsunami” will we likely see in the near future?
I wish you a week without “Big Brother” as a passenger.
Yours, Christoph Seyerlein
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
.
You can also find our newsletter “manage:mobility”. here on our website.