Stephen Wilmot
speaker
159 appearances
9 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2025
last heard 4 Sep
Stephen Wilmot’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Desperate turnaround plan.
We're talking a number of job losses that has never been seen before at Volkswagen, which is Europe's largest industrial company.
So it really is of seismic magnitude.
The whole car industry is under huge pressure, and Volkswagen is perhaps the global car maker that's most affected by these pressures, particularly the rise of Chinese automakers.
Volkswagen was the leader in China for many, many years.
Now those Chinese automakers are coming to Europe and elsewhere, putting a lot of pressure on Volkswagen's ministers in Europe.
He hasn't lost that much market share yet, but it's certainly felt the pricing pressure, particularly on the latest technologies such as plug in hybrids.
And then last but not least.
Not least there's the auto tariffs introduced by President Trump last year.
Those have been particularly tough for Volkswagen to handle because it doesn't have many US factories.
So Stephen said that small US footprint could be about to change.
Volkswagen on Wednesday confirmed the appointment of a new US boss.
He's reporting directly to the CEO, which the previous guy didn't, which is a demonstration of how much they want to focus on the US as a market, but also just this idea that they need to empower the regions a bit more and be a bit more serious about putting down deeper routes, like Toyota in North America, in order to really grow there, rather than relying on a vast
The outlook is certainly very tough for global auto brands in China.
Almost no one is showing growth there.
The first companies to really get hit were the mass market brands, Volkswagen in particular, which was a longtime market leader.
lost its pole position in the Chinese market to BYD in 2022, 2023.
Then at the time, Mercedes and BMW and the luxury brands were still doing pretty well.
But now they're really suffering too.
And that's kind of what we're seeing in the results this week.
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