Martin Sander, head of Ford Germany, is moving to the competition and taking over the important sales department at Volkswagen.

He will be responsible for Sales, Marketing and After Sales at the core VW brand from July, the Wolfsburg-based company announced on Thursday. Sander replaces Imelda Labbé, who is leaving VW. VW brand boss Thomas Schäfer said that Sander, with his flair for the international market, would set strategic priorities in marketing and after-sales business. Born in Hildesheim, he was most recently responsible for business in Germany at Ford and headed up the development of the US group's electric vehicles. He is familiar with Volkswagen from his time at Audi, where he worked in European sales, among other things.

Labbé, who was born in 1967, is leaving the company for personal reasons as part of a retirement plan, it was also reported. The business administration graduate had been responsible for sales on the VW brand Board of Management since May 2022. During this time, she made a significant contribution to the repositioning of the brand with the Energize project, said Schäfer.

Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume has prescribed a fitness program for his company that is expected to generate ten billion euros in savings for the core VW brand alone by next year. The sales department is also to contribute to this performance program.

According to a report, VW dealers recently criticized considerations to sell not only electric cars but also high-margin combustion vehicles via an agency model. The cars would be sold directly from the manufacturer to the customer, with the dealer receiving a predetermined profit margin. Dealers have criticized the fact that they would then have less influence on pricing and lower margins. The president of the dealer association VAPV told Handelsblatt that this would prompt many dealers to rethink their business model with VW. The Wolfsburg-based car manufacturer introduced an agency model for electric cars in 2020.

(Report by Christina Amann. edited by Sabine Wollrab. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at Berlin.Newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or Frankfurt.Newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets)