Porsche backs Volkswagen’s e-car strategy shift, raises voting rights share

The holding company of luxury carmaker Porsche SE has increased its voting rights share in Volkswagen and explicitly backed the largest German carmaker’s strategic shift towards electric mobility. “We continue to believe that Volkswagen Group has a significant potential to increase its value,” Porsche SE CEO and VW Group supervisory board member Hans Dieter Pötsch said in an article carried by the news agency Reuters.  The company increased its share in Volkswagen from 52.2 to 53.1 percent by buying shares worth about 400 million euros.
In an article by Max Hägler and Stefan Mayr in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Pötsch was quoted as saying that Volkswagen’s push to turn Germany into an e-car country with state support had “no plan B,” vowing that “we will do this now.”

Volkswagen has recently announced its intention to drastically speed up its planning to convert the company into a leading e-car producer, saying it would produce over 20 million electric cars in the next ten years. The company’s radical turn towards e-cars has caused a clash with its competitors and with the influential car lobby group VDA, which Volkswagen threatened to leave if it does not support its approach to quickly transforming the German auto market.