The mid-December Supervisory Board meeting at Audi was less of a holiday party and more of a corporate “reckoning”. CEO Gernot Döllner walked in with a five-year plan and walked out with a massive headache. According to reports from Manager Magazin, Döllner’s financial projections collided head-on with the strict targets set by Volkswagen Group CFO Arno Antlitz. The gap is about just a few billion euros.
Döllner has been tasked with carving out five billion euros in savings, yet he’s still digging through the couch cushions for another two billion that “should still be found”. Döllner has temporarily axed the long-rumored, dedicated Audi US factory from the agenda. While rivals BMW and Mercedes enjoy their tax-sheltered lifestyles in Spartanburg and Tuscaloosa, Audi remains painfully exposed to US import tariffs, bringing in almost everything from Europe except for the Mexican-built Q5. To dodge the taxman without spending billions on a new building, Audi is getting creative.
The new strategy involves “borrowing” space. Döllner is reportedly eyeing the new Scout Motors plant to build a “large SUV”, likely a range extender model utilizing the Scout platform. Furthermore, the Audi Q4 e-tron might find itself packed off to the VW Chattanooga plant in Tennessee, which is already set up for the MEB platform. This would leave the Zwickau plant in Germany a little lonely, though recent shifts to keep the Cupra Born and ID.3 there have temporarily eased local anxieties.
However, Döllner’s biggest problem might not be the budget, but the people. A recent anonymous internal survey of 3,000 employees returned scores so low, ranging from a dismal 1.9 to a “peak” of 2.6 on a 6-point scale, that the CEO himself compared the results to a “5+,” which in the German grading system is a resounding “F”.
With the Porsche and Piëch families turning up the pressure to see how the Group’s 160-billion-euro investment pool is being spent, Döllner is finding that in the automotive world, the only thing harder than building a car is keeping your job when the math doesn’t add up.
