Porsche may have never dreamed that his current life would be so miserable. A few days ago, the 2025 financial reports of various car companies were released, and Porsche was particularly dazzling among them. Full-year revenue fell by nearly 10% year-on-year, and global deliveries also dropped by 10% year-on-year. The most terrifying thing is operating profit, which was only 413 million euros, a year-on-year drop of 92.7%.
Luo Mingkai, who just took over as Porsche CEO on January 1 this year, said at the financial report meeting, so what, we seem to be facing a bit of a headwind.Immediately announced a strategic and organizational adjustment "the largest in the history of the company."
Although Luo Mingkai did not mention a very important measure, based on the existing information, it is likely to include reducing the role of pure electric models in the future, allowing Porsche to return to the fuel vehicle track where it is good at.
One of the clues is that the Porsche Taycan, which has a group of imitators in China, may say goodbye to us soon. According to reports from foreign automotive media AUTOCAR, Porsche is currently considering merging the Taycan and Panamera into a unified Panamera model series.
Similar to the current Cayenne and Macan, it will become a new model with hybrid, pure petrol and pure electric power versions.
Similar treatment to the Taycan is the 718 coupe. Although Porsche has refuted rumors that the pure electric 718 has not been cancelled, they have also made it clear that they will introduce internal combustion engines in some 718 models. Therefore, there is a high probability that the next generation 718 will also have a combination of new and old energy sources.
No longer making a separate pure electric model, Porsche is retreating on the pure electric track this time.
But this is actually quite interesting, because it is also due to the slow electrification transition that leads to poor sales. Several of Porsche's European buddies, such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and even Ferrari, have increased their electrification efforts, with more pure electric models becoming more and more popular.
But why is it that Porsche, which was the first to mass-produce an 800V high-voltage platform and the first to build the fastest tram in New York and Northampton, was the first to give up on the tram?
But if you are Luo Mingkai, the new CEO who just took over Porsche, and think back to your "pig teammates" in the Volkswagen Group and your own ambitions, this may be the only thing you can do now.
Porsche’s “pig teammate” in the Volkswagen Group is called CARIAD, a software technology company under the Volkswagen Group. When it was founded in 2020, its goal was actually very clear, which was to build a common software architecture for all brands in the Volkswagen Group.
Including car and machine systems, including electronic and electrical architecture, each brand only needs to make targeted fine-tuning on this basis, thereby reducing Volkswagen's dependence on external suppliers such as Bosch and Continental, and at the same time improving development efficiency.
The former Porsche also trusted CARIAD as a teammate. When developing PPE with Audi, which is now the platform of the electric Macan, the software architecture used the latter's E³1.2. Another higher-end high-performance pure electric platform, SSP, although it has not yet been mass-produced, the bottom layer is also CARIAD’s software architecture E³2.0.
What people didn't expect was that CARIAD, an organization that was supposed to improve efficiency, was holding back Bozi for a while because its own efficiency was too low.
Because they have different brand backgrounds, CARIAD's 6000 employees always have internal friction due to different code requirements when developing. You think the delay should be lower, but he thinks the scheduling strategy should not be so aggressive.
What’s even worse is that in interviews with foreign media, CARIAD employees even said that they don’t even have a software engineer. They are all test managers, error managers, and project managers, and all software development is outsourced.
As a result, CARIAD not only makes things slowly, but also mostly produces semi-finished products.
For example, it is obviously just a simple OTA upgrade, but the Volkswagen ID.3/4 that uses the E³1.1 software architecture is unable to do anything. It can only make car owners go to the store to plug in and upgrade through a large-scale recall.
Another example is that due to too many software bugs, Porsche’s important new car, the pure electric Macan, was delayed for two years before its release. The flagship model K1, originally planned to be built based on the SSP platform, has disappeared.
As a result, the relationship between CARIAD and the Volkswagen Group has become that the former needs to lose nearly 3 billion US dollars every year. Brands such as Porsche that need its support get nothing, and they have to spend money every year to maintain the operation of old platforms (such as the Panamera's MSB platform and the Taycan's J1 platform).
This is why in 2023, Obermühne, the former CEO of Porsche and the CEO of the Volkswagen Group at the time, fired all CARIAD executives in a rage, and also cut 2,000 jobs along the way.
The result is good now. The progress of electrification was originally slow, but now the department responsible for electrification is undergoing a major change, and new cars have become even more distant. The pure electric vehicles of Taycan and 718 will be integrated into existing models. It is true that CARIAD, a "pig teammate", has no way to save itself and wants to stop the loss as soon as possible.
Of course, as I said before, reducing the proportion of pure electric models in the future actually has a relatively important strategic significance for Porsche, that is, it may be able to take a slight advantage in the new era of fuel vehicles.
Explain what the new era of fuel vehicles is. Unlike the equal treatment of petrol and electric technology in the Chinese market, the policy environment in Europe can be said to be abhorrent to fuel vehicles.
After a series of policy iterations and corporate protests, the Europeans’ current decision is that by 2035, 90% of new cars must be pure electric vehicles, and the remaining 10% can use internal combustion engines, but must use sustainable bio- or e-fuels.
The attitude of a group of European car companies towards this policy is almost like a joke. The production and manufacturing costs of sustainable fuels are much higher than ordinary gasoline and diesel. It is really better to just follow the trend and build electric cars than to go to all the trouble to do this.
But Porsche is different. They want to be the leader in this 10% narrow market and continue to make their cars burn fuel.
So in 2022, they built a synthetic fuel facility called Haru Oni in Chile to produce methanol fuel efuel through wind power and carbon dioxide capture.
According to their plan, the efuel output of intellectual facilities will reach 5,500 liters per year in the next one or two years, and will directly rush to 550 million liters per year in the next two years - equivalent to 1.2% of Germany's annual automobile oil consumption. ,
In order to achieve this goal, Porsche's previous plan was to spend US$100 million on various aspects related to efuel.
If you want to ask why Porsche insists on efuel so much, Porsche's answer is that they want to give fuel vehicles that will still be driven on the road a more environmentally friendly option. Even though efuel cars will be more expensive in the future,:
“Costs can be reduced to a level that is acceptable to at least a subset of customers who are willing to pay more to keep classic cars and high-end sports cars on the road for years to come. ”
It sounds quite romantic, right, but anyone with a discerning eye can see that the cost of electric vehicles is becoming more and more transparent and progress is getting faster and faster. It is almost impossible to earn the premium of luxury brands by relying on electric vehicles.
But the future fuel vehicle market is different. It is not only small in scale, but also has high barriers to entry (fuel and corresponding internal combustion engine technology are required). This scarcity means high premiums.
In the Porsche 2035 strategy we mentioned earlier, there is a very key idea called "quality over quantity." To put it bluntly, it means reducing the scale of the business and focusing only on a few core businesses that can make money and have a premium.
Combined with their actions of betting on sustainable fuels and weakening electrified products, the so-called "quality" in Porsche's eyes is likely to be the Porsche gas cars and Porsche PHEVs that can still buzz with the accelerator when electric cars are running on the streets in many years.
It's hard, but it's really fun. But at a time when sales, revenue and profits are plummeting, I think there is still a question mark as to how much determination and cost Porsche can really invest in this ideal.
Wish it good luck, and hope that when I have the ability to drive a Porsche, I can still hear the tractor-like sound of the 911.