mais um excelente artigo do Auto News, que levanta uma série de questões no médio prazo da porsche.
Christiaan Hetzner
Automotive News Europe
August 4, 2014 06:01 CET It's hard to avoid superlatives when describing the remarkable growth trajectory of Volkswagen Group's premium sports car brand, Porsche. Whether one looks at unit sales, revenues or profits, business is booming.
Strong global demand for its products has Porsche on course to top its goal of surpassing annual vehicle sales of 200,000 by next year – if not this year – analysts predict, well ahead of its 2018 deadline. The sales surge, however, has some industry watchers worried that Porsche's parent is placing too much emphasis on volume, which risks robbing the brand of its exclusivity while also raising the danger of quality problems.
Currently, those troubles aren't pressing at Porsche, which has been an absolute steal for VW Group ever since it paid 8.4 billion euros for the equity while shouldering another 2.5 billion in debt. Porsche made an astonishing 700 million euros in operating profit in the first quarter alone.
Even if the VW brand were to have boosted its first-quarter earnings by another half it still wouldn't have matched Porsche despite selling 26 times as many cars. In the future, Porsche likely will contribute even more than the 2.6 billion euros it provided to VW last year now that VW executives estimate post-integration synergies between the two will amount to more than 1 billion euros a year versus the previous estimate of more than 700 million euros.
Margins continue to hum along at double-digit rates, and perceived workmanship is amongst the highest in the industry.
According to J.D. Power's influential U.S. customer satisfaction survey, Porsche came in first for the second straight year in its annual Initial Quality Study. The Boxster, 911 and Panamera all ranked at the top of their respective segments, while the Cayenne finished second only to the Lincoln MKX in the U.S.-based study.
Porsche’s Leipzig plant also took home J.D. Power's award for the best European plant in terms of build quality. A separate J.D. Power annual survey for Germany also placed Porsche at the top.
"The acid test is customer satisfaction," Porsche CEO Matthias Mueller said in June after the results were published. "For us, the ratings are both a confirmation as well as an incentive to continue along our path to quality growth."
Macan magic
Porsche expects another sales and profit boost as it benefits from the global rollout of its new Macan, a compact SUV derived from sister brand Audi’s Q5. Starting in 2015, the company plans to build 50,000 Macans a year, but that total could rise as the waiting time to get the SUV is already six months.
When Mueller became the new CEO of Porsche in 2010, he concluded that doubling sales volumes to more than 200,000 cars by 2018 was achievable without having to sacrifice its operating margin target of at least 15 percent. "Taking our exclusivity and our premium standards as a given, this development will be driven by expanding our product portfolio and our worldwide market presence," he had said at the time.
Mueller likes to note that out of every 1,000 cars sold around the world only two or three are Porsches, the implication being it will stay that way. Now he's set to meet his 2018 volume goal three years early, and operating margins, which have ranged between 17 percent and 19 percent since 2010, remain strong.
Quality control
Managing such an expansion in a controlled fashion can prove problematic, especially for a brand that lives off of exclusivity. Porsche earlier this year had to recall the 911 GT3 to replace engines because of problems with the connecting rods that could lead to a fire. Also, brake boosters on the Macan needed to be checked earlier this year for faults.
The waiting time for the new Porsche Macan already is 6 months.
Arndt Ellinghorst, head of automotive research at ISI in London, fears VW Group is killing the golden goose and argues that Porsche needs to make headlines with trailblazing new technology rather than churning out more model lines to fill vacant market segments.
"Volkswagen’s financials pretty much rest on the earnings performance of their premium business, so it’s very important [to VW] that these brands achieve the returns that they are generating. Just like with other parts within the Volkswagen group, it’s a sales-driven business and Porsche is going for volume,"” he said. "The question then becomes at what point do you lose your premium image? Porsche is already becoming a pretty mainstream product in some markets such as London.”
The ISI analyst cited the price point for Porsche's new mid-sized SUV as a prime example. In Germany, the 3.0-liter six-cylinder Macan S with 340 hp has the same 58,000 euro price tag as the equivalent BMW X4 xDrive35i, which offers only 300 hp. In the United States, the Macan’s base price is just 4 percent higher.
Porsche’s expansion is different than the more conservative approach taken by its Italian rivals Ferrari and Maserati. Ferrari boss Luca Cordero di Montezemolo said the racecar manufacturer could easily sell a lot more cars in markets such as China or the oil-rich Persian Gulf, but it doesn’t want to. “Exclusivity plays a big role. That’s why we are the only car company to decide to build and sell fewer cars in the future. … It’s enough for the moment,” he told German weekly news magazine
Focus last month. Sister brand Maserati plans to cap its sales once it reaches its target of 75,000 cars in 2018.
Changing perceptions
Brand experts argue that customers’ perceptions of luxury brands have evolved over time. That means the benchmark can no longer be described simply as selling one fewer Porsche car or Hermes handbag than the market demands. Star fashion designers Stella McCartney and Jimmy Choo went down-market with clothes and shoe collections they sold through Swedish fashion chain H&M, yet the excitement generated crowds that went around the block.
“Twenty years ago a luxury brand would never have collaborated with a High Street retailer,” said Manfred Abraham, managing partner at BrandCap consultancy. “Maintaining the perception of luxury by artificially restricting the number of sales is a very old-fashioned view. Offering a personalized experience for the customer can achieve the same effect,” he said.
For example, Porsche’s own Travel Club offered customers the chance to drive the new Macan before its market launch, taking the SUV on a two-day road trip through the Pyrenees mountains before ending up in Barcelona, Spain. The company also runs driving schools in 13 of its biggest markets. Customers who bought the Porsche 911 Club Coupe had their names engraved by laser on the exterior trim of the car’s body panel. Clients also receive a personalized photo album documenting the vehicle’s manufacturing process. “It is our intention to offer our customers a unique purchasing and ownership experience,” Porsche Vice President of Marketing Kjell Gruner said in a release.
The Cayenne (shown) accounted for more than 40% of Porsche’s sales in the first half. The brand’s No. 2-selling model, the 911, accounted for less than 20%.
Wiedeking’s legacy
Much of the success of Porsche can be attributed to its former CEO, Wendelin Wiedeking, who rebuilt the company almost from scratch after inheriting a once proud carmaker on the brink of failure in the early 1990s.
He was the initial architect behind stretching the Porsche brand to incorporate models beyond the traditional rear-engine 911 Carrera, starting first with the Boxster and following up with the Cayenne SUV – now the brand’s top seller accounting for more than 40 percent of sales in the first half – prompting fears lingering to this day that Porsche is gradually undermining its sports car DNA.
Unlike fellow Stuttgart premium carmaker Mercedes-Benz, Wiedeking didn’t have the advantage of scale, and needed to maintain extreme vigilance when it came to Porsche’s fixed-cost base. While Mercedes could afford a Formula One team to boost its reputation, Porsche eschewed the circuit to preserve profits. Wiedeking introduced a lean production system in which all lower-margin operations that were not a core competence were outsourced to third parties.
If Porsche wanted to expand output to meet demand, it couldn’t simply adopt the usual cost-effective solution and add another production hall to its traditional factory in northern Stuttgart. Located within the relatively densely populated district of Zuffenhausen, the plant was limited by zoning considerations and other municipal hurdles.
To avoid building a new plant and adding to its fixed costs, Porsche contracted Finnish coachbuilder Valmet to assemble the Boxster. Despite slowly expanding its Zuffenhausen factory through the purchase of adjacent land, Wiedeking maintained his flexible production approach when it came time to begin manufacturing the Cayenne SUV and the Panamera. While both models roll off the line in Leipzig, the plant located in the former East Germany initially only served as a destination for final assembly as most work was carried out in Volkswagen factories. This ceased with last year’s production start of the Macan, when Leipzig finally had its own dedicated paint and body shop at the cost of a half a billion euros in investment.
Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, head of the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen, argues that this kind of flexible production system where capacity of Porsche’s own plants runs flat out is actually more important than creating economies of scale through ever-rising volumes. “The secret to Wiedeking’s success was keeping the manufacturing capacity at all times fully utilized. Porsche’s decision to invest heavily in insourcing its production endangers that since its fixed costs increase in step with capacity,” he said.
Ironically, it was Wiedeking’s plan to acquire the much-larger VW Group that gave Volkswagen the opportunity to buy the sports car maker in the first place. The Porsche and Piech families wanted to keep the carmaker independent, but Wiedeking’s risky maneuver almost bankrupted the company and the clans had to sell their coveted sports car maker to VW to repay banks billions of euros in borrowed money. Indeed the price agreed was so cheap that the call options used by VW Group to guarantee the purchase became more valuable than anyone could have possibly predicted. Altogether Volkswagen was able to book nearly 19 billion euros in additional non-cash profits in 2011 and 2012 thanks to the deal.
More model lines
Mueller and his boss, VW Group CEO Martin Winterkorn, are looking for ways to keep Porsche’s sales on the rise. First they lifted the ban on diesel-powered Porsches, adding an Audi 3.0-liter TDI engine to the Cayenne, something Wiedeking had always refused to do. News that Porsche now wants to add two more model lines to its family on top of the Macan also raised eyebrows. Mueller is considering shrinking the Panamera four-door large sedan to offer a smaller four-door model and is also eyeing a sports car that fits between the 911 Turbo and Porsche’s highest priced model, the 768,000-euro 918 Spyder. This would allow the brand to launch a fully redesigned next-generation model each year.
ISI’s Ellinghorst said the sales-driven approach embraced by Porsche over the longer term is a problem. “They are now going to squeeze the brand by using the VW toolbox, re-engineering a few bits here and there, rebadging it as a Porsche and then selling 50,000 to 100,000 units, since they know the Chinese will buy them,” he said. “Being an innovation leader is a different story, and that’s where I haven’t seen a lot coming from Porsche in the last decade. What BMW is doing with the i3, what Tesla is doing with the Model S, that is innovation-leading. [Porsche] risks losing their exclusivity – not in the next five years certainly, but over the longer term if they continue like this.”
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