Diess has been at the helm of the car group since 2018.
(Photo: IMAGO/SEPA.Media)
Wolfsburg Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess surprisingly leaves the Wolfsburg carmaker at the end of August. His successor will be the boss of the sports car subsidiary Porsche AG, Oliver Blume.
In personal union, the 54-year-old will also remain CEO of the Stuttgart sports car manufacturer. The VW Group announced this on Friday evening after a supervisory board meeting.
This means that Herbert Diess has to leave the Wolfsburg group after seven years. He has been at the head of the entire group since April 2018, before that he headed the core brand Volkswagen Passenger Cars.
With the change at the top of the group, the supervisory board is drawing the conclusions from years of quarrels about Herbert Diess. He was on the verge of being thrown out several times, most recently in early December 2021. At that time, he had drawn the ire of the employees when he suggested cutting 30,000 jobs at the headquarters in Wolfsburg.
In the past, the Porsche-Piech family who owned the company still stood by Diess and ensured that he was able to keep the board position. “But now the initiative has come from the family to throw him out,” it said in the evening from corporate circles. This was primarily due to the dispute over the direction of the software subsidiary Cariad over the past few months. “That was the final push,” said Wolfsburg.
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Chairman of the Supervisory Board Hans Dieter Pötsch thanked Diess. During his time as CEO of both the Volkswagen brand and the Group, he played a key role in driving forward the company’s transformation. Diess significantly advanced the conversion of VW in terms of e-mobility.
After the change at the top of VW became known, the group’s shares initially fell by a good two percent.
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