Automotive News Europe - September 2019 - 10

AUTOMOTIVE NEWS EUROPE

Q&A

QA Agility advantage
Volvo CEO Samuelsson explains why he sees disruption as a 'huge opportunity'

olvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson is more
convinced than ever that the Geelyowned automaker needs to capitalize on
the disruptive movements taking place
in the industry. Volvo aims to use its
small size, compared with BMW or Mercedes-Benz, to generate half its global
sales from full-electric cars by 2025 and
have one-third of the cars it sells to be
fully autonomous by then. A more immediate goal in Samuelsson's sights
is to break the automaker's worldwide
vehicle sales record for a sixth straight
year. He discussed this and more with
Automotive News Europe Managing Editor Douglas A. Bolduc

Is it easier for a company of Volvo's
size to achieve this transition compared with larger rivals?
If you are a big company you might see
all of these changes as threats, but we
see them as an opportunity. With that
as the base, I will probably never be
satisfied with how fast we are moving.
I would like to see us move faster but
it is also important to bring the entire
organization with you. That is often the
challenge. There are internal forces
that want to operate as you always
have, so it is a challenge to get them
to go along with the change. But that is
what we have to do.

Is Volvo on track to sell 700,000 cars
this year?
It's absolutely achievable this year and
our ambition is to reach 800,000 next
year. We have always said that when we
reach that we should also be as profitable as our premium colleagues, which
means a margin of about 8 percent. We
are on the way because we have never
had such a strong product offering.

What about the ongoing move toward
offering self-driving cars?
When it comes to that it is a bit more
challenging technically than we originally thought. But we are still convinced our
next-generation cars should have what
we call a Highway Pilot [which takes control of the car on a highway]. We will be
very careful to avoid bringing out something that is perceived to be automated
and it's not, but the driver is impressed
with what he can do with the system and
then overestimates the capabilities. We
really want to deliver something that
is as safe or even safer than the impression you get. That will come, first for
usage on the highway.

Your German premium rivals are trying to save money through cost cuts.
Does Volvo need to take any steps
such as reducing staff?
Yes, but it will mainly be consultants. We
have been reducing their numbers and
squeezing them a bit harder. In addition,
we are more frequently asking why we
can't do a task or a project ourselves.
We are also going to be more restrictive
when it comes to hiring.
Could you share any figures on your
planned cuts?
We have the numbers but we haven't communicated them externally, and we don't
plan to because it could give the impression that we have to rely on cost cuts to
achieve our strategy. That is not the case.
Our success is coming from excellent cars,
which hopefully will slowly convince people that we are an interesting alternative.
The industry is moving quickly toward making cars electric and autonomous. You have said that Volvo

www.autonewseurope.com

Meet the boss
❚ NAME: Hakan Samuelsson
❚ TITLE: Volvo Cars President & CEO
❚ AGE: 68
❚ MAIN CHALLENGE: Boosting

global sales to more than 700,000
this year and to 800,000 in 2020
despite slowing worldwide demand.

should be at the forefront of this
shift. How is Volvo doing in reaching
this goal?
We are more convinced than ever that
being at the forefront of these so-called
disruptive movements is crucial. As a
small company making this shift will
help us achieve our goal of becoming
more premium and being more relevant
in the global arena. If we don't do this
then we would be following what others
are doing -- or have already done. Disruption or change is a huge opportunity
for a small company.

And the shift to electrification?
We are well underway with models
such as the [full-electric] Polestar 2
and the XC40 coming next year. We
firmly believe there will be a batteryelectric car market that is big enough
for us. Until then what we have is a
very good solution, the TwinEngine
plug-in hybrid. These cars can be driven roughly 50 percent of the time in
full-electric mode. They account for
about 10 percent of the sales in the
model lines where the technology is
available, which is a very high percentage. We have an ambitious ramp up as
we will not release any future models
that are combustion only. At a minimum they will be mild hybrids. ANE

SEPTEMBER 2019

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Automotive News Europe - September 2019

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