Днес в ФТ:
Herbert Diess, Volkswagen chief executive, sees an existential challenge to the traditional auto business from new challengers. “If we continue at our current speed, it is going to be very tough,” he recently told senior managers at VW. It is a concern shared by Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor. In an interview with the FT this month, she said that software companies were inserting themselves into producer-customer relationships, becoming essential “intermediaries” between businesses and their clients.
The anxieties are most acute in the automotive industry, which accounts for one-third of German R&D spending. As Tesla challenges all facets of the German carmaking model, some industry executives fear that a century’s worth of combustion engine knowledge might be rendered superfluous.
Just five years ago, such a statement would have seemed ludicrous, but last week the valuation of Tesla — which produced fewer than 500,000 cars in 2019 — overtook that of Volkswagen, which routinely sells more than 10m cars a year. Investors are looking at VW’s global production sites as liabilities rather than assets, while betting that Tesla — like Apple, Google and Facebook before it — could derive new revenues from turning the car into a platform for other services.
Herbert Diess, Volkswagen chief executive, sees an existential challenge to the traditional auto business from new challengers. “If we continue at our current speed, it is going to be very tough,” he recently told senior managers at VW. It is a concern shared by Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor. In an interview with the FT this month, she said that software companies were inserting themselves into producer-customer relationships, becoming essential “intermediaries” between businesses and their clients.
The anxieties are most acute in the automotive industry, which accounts for one-third of German R&D spending. As Tesla challenges all facets of the German carmaking model, some industry executives fear that a century’s worth of combustion engine knowledge might be rendered superfluous.
Just five years ago, such a statement would have seemed ludicrous, but last week the valuation of Tesla — which produced fewer than 500,000 cars in 2019 — overtook that of Volkswagen, which routinely sells more than 10m cars a year. Investors are looking at VW’s global production sites as liabilities rather than assets, while betting that Tesla — like Apple, Google and Facebook before it — could derive new revenues from turning the car into a platform for other services.
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