Herbert Diess
The Volkswagen boss remains in office and is given new tasks.
(Photo: alto.press / Alto Press)
Düsseldorf At Volkswagen, the dispute over CEO Herbert Diess has been settled, the 63-year-old car manager remains at the head of the Wolfsburg-based group. That is the result of the supervisory board meeting on Thursday. At the same time, Diess has to come to terms with a limitation of his tasks: He is largely withdrawing from the operative business and concentrating on the group strategy.
The Supervisory Board also approved the new investment program. The VW Group will invest almost 160 billion euros in its plants and new models over the next five years.
The most important change in the board of directors concerns business in China. In the middle of next year Diess will lose responsibility for the most important sales market of the entire group. Then Ralf Brandstätter takes over responsibility for China, at the moment he is still CEO of the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand. The VW Group, market leader in the People’s Republic, has come under considerable pressure there. The sales figures have fallen massively, the new e-models are only selling slowly.
Brandstätter is supposed to get the Chinese business back on track. At the turn of the year he will be joining the Group’s board of directors, a significant leap forward in his career for the 53-year-old. During the past few weeks he had even been traded as a possible Diess successor at the top of the group. Above all, Brandstätter enjoys the trust of the employees.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and be notified by email.
If he goes to China in the summer, the VW brand also needs a new boss. This position is to be taken over by Thomas Schäfer, currently still CEO of the Czech subsidiary Skoda.
New board team
Volkswagen boss Diess is also handing over responsibility for group sales. To this end, Hildegard Wortmann is moving into the top management body of the group. She is currently head of the sales department on the Audi board of directors in Ingolstadt, and next year she will also be responsible for group sales.
VW chief legal officer Manfred Döss is also joining the group’s board of directors. He succeeds the legal director Hiltrud Werner, who leaves the company at the end of January. The 63-year-old Döss is a confidante of the Porsche / Piëch family who owns. As it is said in Wolfsburg corporate circles, his relationship with CEO Diess is rather distant.
His presence on the group’s board of directors should also ensure that Diess strikes a more moderate tone, especially towards the works council, and does not cause a deep resentment like in the past few weeks. Hauke Stars, who previously worked at Deutsche Börse, will also be the new IT director.
In September, Diess had the employees and the supervisory board calculated whether the number of employees at the headquarters in Wolfsburg could be halved. A good 60,000 people currently work at the corporate headquarters, around 13,000 of them in production. Diess had repeatedly pointed out in the past that Volkswagen absolutely had to become more productive in order to be able to hold its own against new competitors such as Tesla.
Read more about Volkswagen:
That is why the influential employee side at Volkswagen had completely questioned the cooperation with Diess and even expressed their distrust in him. For a while it was even unclear whether the CEO would stay at the top of the group.
In weeks of negotiations under the chairman of the supervisory board, Hans Dieter Pötsch, the compromise had been found whereby Diess was allowed to keep his post, but had to come to terms with the curtailment of his powers.
Works council boss Cavallo: “The coming months will be tough”
At a joint press conference on Thursday with Pötsch, Diess and works council chief Daniela Cavallo, the different camps demonstrated something like a certain unity. VW boss Diess said that he felt strengthened by the decision to reorganize the board.
In addition, the group would regain the confidence of the capital markets. VW shares had suffered massive price losses in the past few months. The news about the restructuring of the Board of Management did not trigger any recovery either, the Volkswagen shares were again in the red on Thursday.
Works council boss Cavallo spoke of a “good day” for Volkswagen after the resolutions of the supervisory board. She also wanted peace to return to Wolfsburg and that the disputes would not be carried out via the media as in the past weeks.
Cavallo did not spare criticism because of the poor chip supply in vehicle production. “The coming months will be tough, we have a real dry spell ahead of us,” she said. Closed days and omitted shifts would accompany the company for a while. Chairman of the supervisory board Pötsch admitted that VW had recently given a bad image to the public. “That was far from great for the company,” he said.
There was agreement on investment planning. For the next five years, the largest European car manufacturer estimates total investments of 159 billion euros. 56 percent of this flow into future topics such as electromobility, networking and software.
More: Volkswagen is investing heavily in new plants and models