Porsche SE, which owns more than 30 percent of the Volkswagen Group, warns of the urgent need to take action to safeguard the future of the German car manufacturer in the face of the various challenges it faces.
© Kittyfly / Shutterstock
10/08/2026
by
O Volkswagen Group faces several challenges and they're looking at thousands of redundancies in the coming years. Porsche SE, one of the main shareholders, came to talk about the current situation of the manufacturer.
In a statement, Porsche SE chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch called for urgent action: “The Volkswagen Group is at a historic crossroads. The decisions Volkswagen makes now will determine its future. For the sake of the company and its sustainable competitiveness, everyone must now step forward and take responsibility. The longer decisions are postponed, the more problems will become. The focus now has to be only on what is needed from the business and economic perspective. All other considerations must be secondary”.
Johannes Lattwein, a member of the board of directors, points to the need for “reduce excess capacity, significantly lower costs and fundamentally strengthen the decision-making and implementation capacities of the Group“.
On the table, as is known a few weeks ago, there is the possible extinction of 100,000 jobs in the coming years. That's what's in an internal memo from Volkswagen's CEO Oliver Blume, according to Reuters. We have already reached an agreement for the cut of 50,000 jobs, and another 50,000 can be added. There is also the risk of closing four German factories.
The restructuring in perspective in the Volkswagen Group is great. However, there are decisions that can be waged by the state of Lower Saxony – owner of about 20 percent (Volkswagen Law), which has already proved against the closure of factories. And workers themselves have a lot of weight on the supervisory board.
The union IG Metall made clear in a statement in June: “Attacks to the VW Law, co-determination and our infrastructure are irresponsible threats. If such plans were followed, we would stop them with all our strength. However, there is another decisive thing: instead of going into blind activism, the board should finally do its job and focus on why it is really responsible: competitive products, technologies, group structures and synergies, as a result, secure employment”.
The pressure of challenges such as strong Chinese competition, regulations and sales breakdown in key markets such as China and the United States of America puts the Volkswagen Group in a challenging situation. In the first half of the year, it recorded a sales drop of 8.4 percent and a fall of 30.7 percent in profits.