EL MUNDO awards Wayne Griffiths the Leading Motoring Award

The president of Seat and Cupra,

, received the EL MUNDO Motor-Gallery Protagonist Award on Wednesday at an event that took place at the Westin Palace Hotel in Madrid and was attended by

, second vice president of the Government and Minister of Labor and Social Economy, and

Secretary General of Industry and Small and Medium Enterprises.

The award ceremony, held in collaboration with

, was attended by the heads of the main automobile firms and numerous personalities from the business world, all of them accompanied by the director of EL MUNDO,

the president of the Editorial Unit,

the CEO and director of the Group,

the general director of Advertising,

and the assistant to the president,

The second vice president has referred to the automotive industry as "vital" for Spain and has highlighted the opportunity that the sustainable mobility model brings to a sector that will be "the vanguard of enormous social and collective changes".

Likewise, Díaz highlighted the economic impact of "the forecast of 140,000 new jobs, an improvement in the contribution to GDP of between one and two points and more than 250,000 electric vehicles, which will have between 80,000 and 100,000 recharging points available".

For his part, Wayne Griffiths has been optimistic despite the current economic uncertainty and has highlighted the need to have "generous and responsible political organisations" with the aim of "taking the great leap towards electrification in Spain and continuing in the podium of car manufacturing in Europe".

In this sense, the president of

recalled "the mobilization of 10,000 million euros to promote the electrification of Spain" by his company and 61 other companies, which represents, in his own words, "the largest industrial investment of the country's history."

Griffiths has highlighted the contradiction of the investment effort with the fact that Spain is at the tail end of Europe in terms of infrastructure development and sales of electric cars, which barely represent 3% of the total.

During his speech, Joaquín Manso highlighted the value of a sector, the automobile sector, which "

if the entire value chain is added together" and defined the "historical moment of change" implied by the transition from the combustion engine to electrification and sustainable mobility.

"In order to successfully face this challenge, we must succeed in the processes of training and adapting workers to the new needs of production, oriented towards efficiency and added value, and be able to compensate for the losses in traditional employment that could occur with the new alternatives that will undoubtedly emerge in the value chain and that we will have to conduct in accordance with a great national plan for the country", he asserted.

Leading Awards of the Motor-Gallery of EL MUNDO

The EL MUNDO Motor-Gallery Protagonist Awards, which celebrate their 16th edition this year, reward professionals who, with their work, contribute to the development of the automotive sector in any of its aspects.

Griffiths (Dukinfield, 1966) is currently president of the Seat and Cupra brands and a member of the Board of Directors of Volkswagen España Group Distribución, which markets the Audi, Skoda, Volkswagen and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles brands.

In addition, he is president of Anfac, the Spanish Association of Car and Truck Manufacturers.

The British executive has been linked to the automotive world all his life.

In 1989 he joined Audi AG as an intern, which meant his entry into the German consortium, in which he has since developed his professional career.

Although it is also possible to mention a brief stint at Seat, between 1991 and 1993, to return to Audi, where he held various positions of responsibility in the commercial division in different markets.

In 2016 he signed on as commercial vice president of Seat SA and was appointed to his current position in the fall of 2020.

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