In the second attempt everything should be better: After Volkswagen with Europcar once failed and sold the then 100 percent subsidiary to the investment company Eurazeo in 2006, the Wolfsburg-based company will soon be in charge again at the car rental company. Only the partners Attestor Investment and Pon Holding, with whom the car manufacturer is planning the takeover, can have a say. Previous Europcar investors, on the other hand, are being pushed out of the company.
The number of shares required for the squeeze-out was tendered by the June 29 deadline, Volkswagen said on Tuesday. Overall, the consortium secured a good 93.6 percent of the shares at a price of 51 cents. On July 13, Volkswagen wants to take Europcar off the stock exchange, the deal is worth around 2.4 billion euros.
The car manufacturer is then planning a complete conversion at the rental car group. Recently, things were not going well at Europcar, the new owners are taking over as renovators. In 2021, the company made a small profit of 10.3 million euros. A year earlier, the group had made a loss of 349 million euros. In the future, little should remain as it was before.
Volkswagen intends to continue using the Europcar network with around 2,700 stations and a fleet of over 230,000 vehicles as a customer contact point. But the pure landlord is to become a super app for mobility – with a quartet of offers from car sharing, ride hailing, car rental and car subscription. Christian Dahlheim (53), CEO of Volkswagen Financial Services, was convinced on Tuesday that the combination of the various business models was the right way: “No one has really made any money with subscriptions or car sharing. If we offer everything from a single source, we will a successful model of it.”
Volkswagen expects that the desire for individual mobility will continue to dominate in 2030, explained Dahlheim, but until then customers would prefer the option of using a vehicle to owning it. The planned mobility platform is the answer. It will be really lucrative when autonomous vehicles are ready for the market. The carmaker hopes that this will lead to an “even higher level of efficiency and profitability”. By 2025, Volkswagen says it wants to be ready to run the first tests with converted ID buzz models. But the schedule seems overly ambitious. After the numerous problems at the software company Cariad
it currently looks like the necessary software will not be available until 2026 at the earliest.
In the future, the individual Volkswagen Group brands will also be involved. Not every make will have its own sharing or rental offer. But that is planned for car subscriptions. “Customers ask for it,” says Dahlheim. In the future, control will be entirely at Europcar. The situation is different with other VW mobility services such as Moia. The ride hailing service should also be available via Europcar. However, complete integration is not planned; instead, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles will continue to operate Moia as a separate sub-brand.
Volkswagen will launch the first test balloons for its own new world of mobility in the fourth quarter of 2022 in Vienna and in the first quarter of 2023 in Hamburg. Other cities in Europe are to follow, including an expansion into the United States is conceivable. However, Europcar will not become an exclusive Volkswagen supplier. Vehicles from other brands will also be available in the rental fleet in the future, “but possibly financed by Volkswagen Financial Services,” explained Dahlheim.