A year ago, Oliver Blume lauded his decision to approve the Taycan electric saloon for production at his first ever supervisory board meeting as Porsche CEO back in 2015.
“We were talking about billions in investment. It required a lot of courage,” he recalled.
A decade after that meeting, however, Porsche is having to backtrack on its electric ambitions after a grim year: Taycan sales plummeted 49%, demand in China fell 28% and the company's share price tumbled 53% from its 2023 peak.
The fallout has pushed Porsche to the brink of a major leadership overhaul. The company recently made the unusual announcement that the contracts of deputy chairman and chief financial officer Lutz Meschke and sales and marketing director Detlev von Platen could be terminated. The pair were blamed for the company’s downturn and a faltering share price.
Whether other top managers are being targeted remains unclear, but Blume’s dual role as both Porsche CEO and overall Volkswagen Group CEO is one being questioned by investors.
In response, Porsche recently announced that it would spend an additional €800 million (£666.2m) in 2025 partly to “expand the product portfolio to include additional vehicle models with combustion engines or plug-in hybrids”.
Some of that money could go towards extending the life of the ICE Macan SUV and reversing the original plan to retire it globally in favour of the all-new Macan Electric, Porsche insiders have told Autocar.
The company is still expected to launch the Cayenne Electric SUV later this year or in early 2026 to sell alongside its best-selling and newly updated ICE Cayenne.
But the electric 718 Boxster and Cayman sports cars due for launch this year could be delayed amid teething problems, while the planned ‘K1’ large electric SUV to sit above the Cayenne faces an even more uncertain future.
Porsche’s woes are both internal and external.
Externally, the company has been hit by the wider luxury slowdown in China, to the point that executives have admitted they need to permanently shrink the dealer network and sales organisation there. China’s economy is partly to blame, but so too is the sheer strength of the local competition, particularly on EVs.
Meanwhile, the US is poised to backtrack on EVs after the return of climate-change sceptic Donald Trump to the presidency, giving a longer glide path to ICE cars.
With the US now Porsche’s strongest market, making up 28% of the company’s total sales of 310,718 last year, and China shrinking from a quarter in 2023 to just 18%, the centre of gravity has moved more towards ICE cars – at least outside of Europe.
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