Forget the growth charts. Forget the quarterly goals. They are gone.
Porsche’s new boss, Michael Leiters, isn’t interested in hitting four hundred thousand sales a year. He wants half that. Two hundred thousand. And if you think shrinking your business sounds soft, look at the methods. Workforce cuts. Board shrinkage. Structural amputation. It’s a drastic pivot for a brand that spent the last few years under Oliver Blume screaming for growth, aiming high, hiring harder, and expanding fast.
The reality hit hard last year.
Electric vehicles didn’t sell like the spreadsheet promised. China stalled. The US cooled. Profits plummeted to roughly 1%. Just barely profitable. Not enough to build a fortress. Enough to barely survive winter.
So now Leiters arrives, fresh from fixing McLaren, with a different mandate. He’s already dissolving the Car-IT division. Eight divisions down to seven. Rumor has it the executive board might shrink too, returning to a six-person lineup reminiscent of the Matthias Müller era. But the boardroom reshuffle is small change.
The factories are the real target.
Last year, Porsche moved about 280,00 cars. Down 30k from the prior year. This year? First quarter sales dropped another 15%. The trend isn’t slowing; it’s accelerating downward. Leiters is talking to the works council in Germany about cutting costs, which is corporate code for letting people go. We don’t have a final headcount yet. But Weissach is bleeding. That development hub, home to 5,200 souls, might see a quarter of those jobs vanish.
Efficiency over prestige. That seems to be the new motto.
Sales chief Matthias Becker? He might be next. Absent from the Beijing Auto Show. Blamed, publicly and quietly, for the slump in China. In a luxury market, missing your biggest growth engine isn’t an oversight. It’s a career capstone.
What happens next isn’t fully written yet. They’re looking to merge production and procurement to fix overcapacity. Aim is a 10-15% operating margin by decade’s end. That’s healthy. Sustainable even.
But does Porsche still want to be Porsche if it makes half as many cars as it dreamed of three years ago? Nobody is asking for a answer. Just results.
And maybe a slightly quieter parking lot.
