Dear reader,
Whether rail or Lufthansa: Habemus tariff agreement! That you can still write that, especially after the endless dispute between the railways and the GDL. More money, inflation compensation, 35-hour week: The train drivers are getting a nice package that will hopefully keep them from further strikes for a long time. Perhaps the approaching retirement of GDL boss
Claus Weselsky
(65) also contributes to this.
The union boss has achieved a lot for his members. Some are concerned about the trend towards increasingly comfortable conditions for employees. manager magazine columnist
Klaus Schweinsberg,
for example. The economics professor says: Germans have to work more again. Critics are likely to immediately comment: “Work smarter, not harder.” Only one thing seems certain: even if the railway solves a problem, it continues to provide a topic of conversation.
Our
topics of the week
:
Why Volkswagen board member Thomas Schmall believes a return to combustion engines is wrong
How Flix wants to become a stock market star
Why there are rumors about ZF's China board member Stephan von Schuckmann
Top topic: VW technical director Schmall warns of the combustion engine comeback
As soon as the sales figures start to sag a little, electromobility as a whole is called into question. Mercedes boss
Ola Källenius
(54) was most prominent in moving away from “electric only”. Is Volkswagen also turning towards combustion engines again? Three years ago, Chief Technology Officer
Thomas Schmall
(60) was celebrated for his announcement that he would build six large battery factories. But as steeply as VW shares subsequently rose, they have since fallen again. The company's electric cars are not doing well. However, Schmall rejects a U-turn in Michael Freitag's interview. “The future belongs to electromobility. In any case, we must and will maintain our strategy,” says the gentleman about the battery cells. Investors have already warned him: “Thomas, there’s no room to fail.”
Heads: Fengying Wang ++ Katrin Lehmann ++ Adrian Hallmark ++ Michael Steiner
Head of Germany at a Chinese automobile manufacturer – sounds exciting, but it can turn into a hellish job. The first governors of BYD and Nio in this country quickly left. Does
culture shock
also affect
Markus Schrick
(63)? The former Audi, Toyota and Hyundai manager will start
XPeng
in Germany on May 1st. He doesn't feel any pressure from China:
he hasn't agreed on any utopian goals with sales manager
Fengying Wang
(53). XPeng also wants to avoid some of the mistakes made by Chinese competitors in this country.
Katrin Lehmann
(45) is moving up at Mercedes. The previous Chief Information Officer
Jan Brecht
(52) is leaving the company.
As is well known, Mercedes wants to be luxury. Someone who doesn't work for the Swabians embodies more luxury than most active automobile managers:
Adrian Hallmark
(61) has almost always been at the upper end of automotive dreams; most recently he steered Volkswagen's luxury subsidiary Bentley on an inconspicuously solid course. He can now try it elsewhere. Hallmark will be the new boss of the severely ailing British sports car brand Aston Martin. A little luxury would be good.
When Hallmark worked for Porsche a quarter of a century ago, software didn't play a major role. Today nothing works without the right code. Porsche's development director
Michael Steiner
(59) wants the sports car manufacturer's own software share and has therefore just announced a development partnership with the start-up Applied Intuition. does this seem familiar to you? Manager magazin reported exclusively on the plans last summer.
Company: ZF ++ Continental ++ BYD ++ Fisker ++ Lucid ++ Volocopter
At
ZF Friedrichshafen
, we hear that hardly a day goes by without “two or three bombs bursting”. Just last week, board member
Martin Fischer
(53) announced his departure. There are whispers in Friedrichshafen about another person from the top: Asian board member
Stephan von Schuckmann
(49) should have been working from the Far East for a long time, but his move is still a long time coming. Officially because of challenges surrounding electromobility. Some people at the constantly nervous supplier are still wondering: Will the next one go out of business soon?
Things are also extremely turbulent at
Continental
. The automotive supplier has now officially confirmed what we had already reported: The locations in Schwalbach and Wetzlar will be closed by the end of 2025.
Car manufacturers were able to keep their prices exceptionally high for a long time, but now the discounts are hitting their stride again. Also at
BYD
. China's premier company continued to increase sales and profits in the last quarter, but the growth was no longer as enormous as before. BYD apparently doesn't want to change course: the car manufacturer is continuing to reduce prices in China.
Meanwhile, the air is getting thinner
for the electric car start-up
Fisker
. The supposed last hope for the company, a cooperation with
Nissan
, has shattered. The New York Stock Exchange now wants to exclude the penny stock from trading.
Another electric car upstart, however, can still hope:
Lucid Motors
is also selling significantly less than expected, but can rely on its friends in Saudi Arabia. The emirate's sovereign wealth fund, which previously owned 60 percent of the US car manufacturer, is pumping another billion dollars into the company.
State money also beckons
Volocopter
. And from home: Federal Transport Minister
Volker Wissing
(53) is apparently keen on an air taxi fiesta. According to SPIEGEL, he is ready to invest 150 million euros in the start-up from Bruchsal. Even warnings from PwC auditors could not deter Wissing.
More mobility: Flix, the train and an accident with consequences
From Franconia to the world:
André Schwämmlein
(42),
Daniel Krauss
(40) and
Jochen Engert
(42) have risen with Flix from a start-up to the world market leader for long-distance bus routes within ten years. The vision is even bigger: the founders want to get up close and personal with Internet travel giants such as Uber, Airbnb and Booking.com. There is no way around the stock market. It could start as early as early summer. My colleague Michael Machatschke analyzed whether the Flix power is enough for a top stock.
Schwämmlein and Co. are often in conflict with
Deutsche Bahn
. She has little desire for competition, she is already busy enough with herself and recently burned 2.4 billion euros. Fresh revenue would be good. The best chance is the sale of the freight forwarding subsidiary
Schenker
; The state-owned company is hoping for up to 15 billion euros. Here too, the railway cannot do so without delay: investors criticize the lengthy procedure of the sales process. Nevertheless, there are said to be seven to ten interested parties.
In Baltimore, a container ship collided so violently with the Francis Scott Key Bridge that the bridge collapsed. Several people are still missing. The economic consequences are limited. A Mercedes-Benz charging terminal is currently cut off from the sea. The car manufacturer wants to adapt its delivery routes.
Number of the week: 7.9
More and more people are riding
Pedelecs
. In 2023, for the first time in Germany, more cyclists bought an electrically assisted bike than a conventional one. However, the increase in comfort does not come without a certain risk: According to the Federal Statistical Office, 7.9 of 1,000 Pedelec accidents resulting in personal injury result in death, while only 3.6 in crashes involving non-motorized bicycles were fatal.
Deep Drive: Debates about the company car
The ongoing company car dispute at Audi sparked another debate on LinkedIn at the beginning of the week: Do we still need company cars? Alphabet says: Yes. According to a study, companies can score points with four wheels even among their youngest employees. The company car is much more in demand among GenZ than, for example, bicycle leasing. But be careful: In this case, Alphabet is not the parent company of Google, but a subsidiary of BMW.
Ghost driver of the week
When Mercedes and BMW still dreamed of great success with car sharing, the vehicles for this were called Car2go and DriveNow. The “wedding in heaven” followed in 2019 and ShareNow was born. Nobody was happy with the marriage in Stuttgart and Munich, and the big bang followed in 2022: Stellantis took over. Now it's high time for a new name. ShareNow GmbH becomes
Free2move Deutschland GmbH
. “What does this change for you? “Nothing at all,” customer service enthuses users in an email and hopes “that you find this news as exciting as we do.” We respond with an ancient meme: “Honestly? Nah.”
I wish you a happy Easter!
Yours, Christoph Seyerlein
Do you have any wishes, suggestions or information that we should take care of journalistically? You can reach my colleagues in the Mobility team and me at manage.mobility@manager-magazin.de.
You can also find our newsletter “manage:mobility” here on our website.