The future of Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen, is in the hands of an ad hoc mediation committee. The hypothesis anticipated by the German press has precipitated the stock of the group, which in Frankfurt closed the session down 4.04% (preferred shares, ordinary shares marked + 1.39%). The head of the company came under scrutiny after the escalation of the trade union conflict resulting from the announcement by the manager of a plan to cut up to 30,000 jobs following the group’s electrical turnaround.
A hypothesis obviously opposed by the workers’ representatives, led by Daniela Cavallo (first woman, since May, head of the works council in Wolfsburg) who consider it just yet another rash move to keep up with Tesla’s competition both in terms of cutting costs than in the conversion of the second largest car manufacturer in the world. Diess has strongly insisted on the need to improve in terms of competitiveness, but the theme is also the competitiveness of the product (on the Vw software he pursues), if it is true that Tesla Model 3 was the best-selling car in Europe, ever, in September, with 24,600 deliveries, detaching the flagships of the German giant’s electric range, namely the ID.3 and the ID.4 SUV. For the first time a non-European manufacturer led the ranking and for the first time it was the turn of a battery-powered car. With this result, Elon Musk’s company also gained leadership in market share (24%) for BEVs, ahead of Vw (22%). Tesla recently reached 1.2 trillion dollars of capitalization (one trillion euros) while the Volkswagen group is now back to 124 billion euros
At the top since 2018, Diess recently saw its mandate renewed until October 2025. The escalation of the fight over its future underlines the fragile balance of power of the world‘s second-largest carmaker, countering Diess’s ambition to make Volkswagen more competitive with Tesla against the influential German unions. The chairman of the supervisory board, Hans Dieter Pötsch, Wolfgang Porsche as representative of the owner families and Prime Minister Stephan Weil for the shareholder Lower Saxony attended a preliminary discussion. Also present were the head of the powerful IG Metall Jörg Hofmann and Daniela Cavallo.