Under the dual pressures of dealer pressure and declining performance, Porsche China is about to change its leader.
Porsche recently announced that Alexander Pollich, who has worked at Porsche for more than 23 years, will take over Michael Kirsch's job as early as September 1 this year and will be based in Shanghai.
Alexander Pollich
Since 2018, Paulich has been Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche Deutschland GmbH. As a sales expert with international experience, Paulich will be responsible for the important Chinese sales market.
He succeeded Porsche China CEO Michael Schmidt, who is about to end his second term in office in China. The last time was from 2012 to 2016, when he was COO of China. During those five years, Porsche could raise prices in China at will and still make money.
But when he came to China again, everything had changed - Chinese consumers, who used to only care about brands, have become more picky, and China's smart electric vehicles seem to have left Porsche helpless, making Porsche's market position in China precarious.
On July 9, Porsche released data showing that its global sales in the first half of this year were 155,900 vehicles, a year-on-year decrease of 7%. Among them, Porsche's deliveries in China fell sharply by 33% to 29,600 vehicles in the first half of the year.
In the current Chinese market, the price war has spread to the luxury market. Dealers are selling cars at a loss. Porsche China has chosen to hold back inventory in order to complete its sales targets. The conflict between the manufacturer and dealers has intensified, and was made public in May this year. One of the demands of the dealers is to ask Porsche headquarters to replace the senior management of the China region. At that time, Porsche headquarters had also sent an investigation team to investigate the problems in the Chinese market. Oliver Blume, who is both the global CEO of Porsche and the global CEO of Volkswagen Group, was also paying close attention to the matter.
Back to Alexander Polic, who is about to take office, in addition to maintaining the current Porsche business, Polic's main tasks also include implementing a value-oriented growth strategy suitable for the brand in the Chinese market.
Among other things, his focus will be on closer cooperation with local dealer partners and further optimisation of internal processes and structures.
Such specific job content is rare in press releases about executive appointments. It is not ruled out that this is a carefully designed rhetoric by Porsche to appease dealers, but it can also be seen that this German luxury brand has begun to take the Chinese market seriously.
