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• Jul 07, 2012  Volkswagen VW conquers the world Germany s biggest carmaker is leaving rivals in the dust Jul 7th 2012 BERLIN From the print edition.

WHEN Ferdinand Piëch arrived as Volkswagen s chief executive in 1993, things looked dire. The carmaker was overspending, overmanned and inefficient, and had lost its reputation for quality. How things have changed: last year the VW group s profits more than doubled, to a record 18.9 billion 23.8 billion. As other European volume carmakers seek to close factories and cut jobs, VW is seizing market share in Europe, booming in China and staging a comeback in America. It plans to spend 76 billion on new models and new factories by 2016. Its global workforce is more than half a million, and growing.

It took years for Mr Piëch now chairman, but still with his hands firmly on the wheel to tame VW s menagerie of semi-independent brands and get to grips with its global empire of factories. He has been a ruthless hirer and firer of executives: only last month Karl-Thomas Neumann was removed as head of VW s Chinese operations, supposedly for his disappointing performance, despite the juicy profits VW is making in China. Mr Neumann had been talked of as a possible successor to the chief executive, Martin Winterkorn.

Mr Piëch is a grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, who founded VW after Hitler called in 1934 for the creation of a cheap people s car, a Volkswagen. The Piëch-Porsche clan controls both VW and Porsche, a sports-car maker that is now being folded into VW after the failure of an overambitious and highly leveraged reverse takeover. On July 4th VW agreed to buy the 50.1 of Porsche it does not yet own for 4.46 billion.

VW is also buying Ducati, a maker of fancy motorbikes, and consolidating MAN and Scania, two lorrymakers, into its commercial-vehicles division. Yet still the firm remains hungry. It has long coveted Alfa Romeo, a premium-car division of Fiat; and is rumoured to be eyeing up Navistar, an American lorrymaker. Mr Winterkorn nevertheless dismisses the suggestion that the group is getting unmanageably big.

Mr Piëch s plan was for VW to become the world s biggest carmaker by volume by 2018. Last year, however, as Toyota struggled with the aftermath of Japan s tsunami and GM floundered in Europe, VW reached its goal seven years early see chart, if you do not count Subaru, Toyota s distant affiliate, or GM s Wuling joint venture in China, which mainly makes Chinese-branded cars.

The 8.5m vehicles VW made last year cover all corners: Volkswagen, Skoda and SEAT in the mass market; Audi in premium cars; Porsche, Bugatti and Lamborghini in sports cars; Bentley at the luxury end; plus various commercial-vehicle brands. Most SEAT excepted are firing on all cylinders. IHS Automotive, a forecaster, expects VW easily to beat its target of 11m sales by 2018.

Fierce competition and regulatory pressure to develop alternative-fuel cars are forcing other makers to seek cost-sharing partnerships. Toyota and BMW are teaming up on low-carbon technologies. GM s Opel division in Europe is joining Peugeot-Citroën to make smaller cars. Daimler is edging towards a threesome with the Renault-Nissan alliance. Sergio Marchionne, the boss of Fiat and Chrysler, recently suggested merging several European makers to create another Volkswagen.

Volkswagen has been better than its rivals at reducing the number of common platforms that its cars are built on. This allows it to offer a fabulous variety of brands and styles while slashing manufacturing costs. The next stage, launched this year, is a versatile platform codenamed MQB, which will underpin the VW Golf, Audi A3, Skoda Octavia and SEAT Leon, in all their variations.

Wolfsburg s lone wolf

VW s size means it seldom needs partnerships with rivals, says Mr Winterkorn. Perhaps this is just as well. Judging by its botched hook-up with Suzuki, a mid-sized Japanese maker, VW is not much good at romance. Suzuki s boss, Osamu Suzuki, has filed for divorce and is taking VW to arbitration to force it to sell its 19.9 stake in Suzuki. Among other things, he has complained of being treated like a subsidiary, rather than a partner. VW had hoped to develop cheap cars for emerging markets with Suzuki, which is big in India. Now it must do so alone, at considerable cost.

In many of the 26 countries where VW has factories, it has been around long enough to be seen as a domestic firm, so protectionists usually leave it alone. The founding family s controlling shareholding, and a blocking stake held by the state of Lower Saxony, where VW is headquartered, allow it to resist short-term pressures to pull out of any market that turns difficult. Rivals envy the stability this brings, especially just now, says Mr Winterkorn.

VW can cope with a collapse of the European car market. Others must make deep cuts or perhaps even, in the case of GM which has lost 16 billion in Europe since 1999 and Ford which gave warning on June 28th of deepening losses there, pull out of the continent altogether.

VW bet on China nearly 30 years ago. Now it is the world s biggest car market and VW has 18 of it, through two joint ventures. They sell 2m vehicles a year and plan to double this by 2018. A glut of cheap cars is hurting prices in China but VW s premium models are doing well: the group s share of its Chinese ventures profits rose from 1.9 billion in 2010 to 2.6 billion last year. VW has long been big in Brazil market share: 22, and is expanding fast in Russia 9. The weakest BRIC in its wall is India, where its share is less than 5. Suzuki, whose affiliate Maruti Suzuki has almost 50 of the Indian market, should have been the perfect partner there.

The Beetlemania that VW enjoyed in America in the 1960s, when its Beetle was the pioneer of smaller, cheaper cars, faded in the 1970s. Decades of weak sales and losses ensued. VW closed its Pennsylvania factory in 1988 because the cars it made were lousy. It tried importing from Mexico but couldn t make this pay. Now, with a big new plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a revamped dealer network and the successful launch of the new Jetta, a family saloon, VW is back on a roll in America. Its sales there rose by 23 last year to 444,000, and its aim of selling 1m cars by 2018 looks achievable. However, VW s quality ratings in America remain well below average, according to surveys by J.D. Power.

Like BMW, another admired German carmaker, VW seems to have succeeded because it is run by petrolheads. Mr Piëch s passion for engineering pervades the group. He is the strategist; Mr Winterkorn the get-things-done guy. Hans-Dieter Pötsch, the chief financial officer, has helped a lot by controlling costs, says Max Warburton of Sanford C. Bernstein, an investment bank. VW s other chiefs enjoy considerable freedom unless they incur the chairman s wrath.

For all VW s success, it is rare to hear people outside the firm praising the Volkswagen Way as they once lauded the Toyota Production System. VW has ignored Toyota s obsession with the production line, says Mr Warburton, and concentrated on saving costs through parts-sharing between models. It has managed to preserve a culture of permanent innovation and a willingness to take risks. If there is a Volkswagen Way, it is to be determined, diligent and attentive to detail, with a glint of ruthlessness.

Still, plenty could go wrong. Toyota captured the top spot from GM in 2008, only to stumble on quality as it rushed for quantity. VW s shared platforms make it vulnerable if one of them turns out to be flawed.

Sprawl and loss of focus are another risk. Take the SEAT brand, for instance, which lost 225m last year. What is it for. Mr Winterkorn describes it as VW s sporty, design-oriented brand for young people. But how does SEAT s new Toledo, which VW describes as a practical, top-quality and affordable car for the whole family, fit that image. If VW already has one brand too many, SEAT is it.

An earlier growth spurt, during Mr Piëch s time as chief executive, led to VW s brands churning out lots of competing models while overlooking popular new trends, such as the compact multipurpose vehicle pioneered by Renault with its Scenic. Upper-end Volkswagens and Skodas are now competing with lower-end Audis. SEATs, Skodas and VWs have different images but much in common under the hood. Relying on buyers brand loyalty has worked so far, but for how long. Procter Gamble, which is to toiletries what VW is to cars, stumbled after taking on every competitor in every category in every region of the world at once, as an analyst put it in The Economist last week. That seems to be what VW is doing now.

VW is so big in China that it would be vulnerable to a downturn there. Likewise in Brazil, where its Chinese rivals are starting to encroach. And VW has a closer challenger in its rear-view mirror: Hyundai-Kia, which is pushing upmarket while continuing to churn out small, good-value motors. It has around half of its home market in South Korea, is ahead of VW with a 9 share in America and is making inroads in Europe and emerging markets. And unlike VW, it does not have a profusion of brands to support.

If the euro falls apart, VW s German factories will suddenly find their costs denominated in expensive Deutschmarks. That cosy relationship with Lower Saxony whose blocking stake the European Commission is seeking to remove might become a burden if VW needed to make swift cuts to maintain profitability. If circumstances require a change of direction, the monoculture at the top of VW may react slowly. With so many executives close to retirement Mr Piëch is 75 and Mr Winterkorn 65 succession is another worry.

However, such problems are hypothetical. As VW drives relentlessly towards world domination, Bernstein s Mr Warburton says that Mr Piëch will go down in history as an automotive legend, in the same class as Gottlieb Daimler, Henry Ford and Kiichiro Toyoda.

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