Volkswagen Group (parent company Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft) is a German multinational automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany. It designs, engineers, manufactures and distributes passenger cars, commercial vehicles, motorcycles, engines and turbomachinery, and offers related services including financing, leasing and fleet management. It is the world’s largest motor vehicle manufacturer by 2011 unit sales and has maintained the largest market share in Europe for over two decades.
Volkswagen Group sells passenger cars under the Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, SEAT, Škoda and Volkswagen marques; motorcycles under the Ducati brand; and commercial vehicles under the MAN, Scania and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles marques. It is divided into two primary divisions, the Automotive Division and the Financial Services Division, and consists of approximately 340 subsidiary companies. The company has operations in approximately 150 countries and operates 94 production facilities across 24 countries. It holds a 19.9% non-controlling shareholding in Suzuki Motor Corporation.
Volkswagen was founded in 1937 to manufacture the car which would become known as the Beetle. The company's production grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s and in 1965 it acquired Auto Union, which subsequently produced the first post-war Audi models. Volkswagen launched a new generation of front-wheel drive vehicles in the 1970s, including the Passat, Polo and Golf; the latter became its bestseller. Volkswagen acquired a controlling stake in the Spanish carmaker SEAT in 1986, making it the first non-German marque of the company, and acquired control of Škoda in 1994, of Bentley, Lamborghini and Bugatti in 1998 and of Porsche in 2012.
Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft is a public company and has a primary listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, where it is a constituent of the DAX index, and secondary listings on the London Stock Exchange, Luxembourg Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange and SIX Swiss Exchange. As of September 2012 20% of the voting rights by the State of Lower Saxony.
Read more about Volkswagen Group: Operations, Sales and Market Share, Sponsorships
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... The group was founded as Strømmen Auto AS in 1936 by Harald A ... Møller AS and became the importer of Volkswagen in 1948, as well as Audi in 1974 ... In 1985 the group gets its present name after merging with Hamas ...
... design and prototyping firm that provides services to the entire Volkswagen Group MML S.p.A ... Lamborghini), a manufacturer of marine engine blocks and VOLKSWAGEN GROUP ITALIA S.p.A ... AUTOGERMA S.p.A.), which sells Audi and other Volkswagen Group vehicles in Italy ...
... This list of Volkswagen Group factories details the current and former manufacturing facilities operated by the automotive concern Volkswagen Group, and ... These include its mainstream marques of Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Audi, SEAT, Škoda and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, along with their premium marques of Ducati, Lamborghini, Bentley, and Bugatti ... The German Volkswagen Group is the third largest automaker in the world, and the largest in Europe ...
... Volkswagen is heavily involved in sports sponsorship, with investments having included the 2008 Summer Olympics, the 2014 Winter Olympics, as well as the David Beckham Academy ... Volkswagen AG wholly owns the Bundesliga football side VfL Wolfsburg the company is also the shirt sponsor of Major League Soccer club D.C ...
... Their final offer of £340m was outbid by Volkswagen Group, who offered £430m ... As part of the deal, Volkswagen Group acquired the historical Crewe factory, plus the rights to the "Spirit of Ecstasy" mascot and the shape of the radiator grille ... the Rolls-Royce name and logo to BMW and not to Volkswagen, largely because the aero-engine maker had recently shared joint business ventures with BMW ...
Famous quotes containing the word group:
“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)