Hamburg (Reuters) – The consortium around the car manufacturer Volkswagen has reached its goal in the multi-billion takeover of the car rental company Europcar.
The new owners secured 93.6 percent of the shares in the company, as announced on Tuesday, citing the French financial market regulator. This will allow buyers to take Europcar off the Paris Stock Exchange as planned. The French car rental company is to become the cornerstone of a new platform for offers relating to car sharing, ride-sharing services and subscription models.
“Today we took an important strategic step to create an industry-leading mobility platform,” wrote VW CFO Arno Antlitz on LinkedIn. The Wolfsburg are betting that in the future the use rather than the ownership of cars will be in the foreground. The head of the VW finance division Christian Dahlheim referred to synergies that exist between leasing, rental and sharing offers. So far, no provider has managed to offer car sharing profitably, while the rental car business is making money. “If you have a fleet that you rent out as needed, that’s a successful business model. If you combine that with leasing to make the best use of residual values, that’s an advantage.”
The Munich car rental company Sixt, which VW is said to have had its eye on last year, already has a mobility platform with the help of which the classic rental business, car sharing and driving services are to grow together. Cars can also be subscribed to via this. The new VW mobility platform is scheduled to start operations in pilot phases in the fourth quarter of 2023 in Vienna and in the first quarter of 2023 in Hamburg.
Volkswagen already has car-sharing activities in some cities under the WeShare brand and offers ride-sharing services with Moia. The expansion is progressing slowly, and the business hardly makes any money in the initial phase. With the Europcar takeover, the Wolfsburg-based company is taking a different approach than Mercedes-Benz and BMW, who sold their car-sharing subsidiary “Share Now” to Opel’s mother Stellantis.
SHAREHOLDERS RECEIVE A SURCHARGE
VW and its partners, the financial investor Attestor and the Dutch mobility group Pon Holdings, had offered shareholders a surcharge of one cent on the offered price of 50 cents per Europcar share if the threshold of at least 90 percent was reached. The remaining shareholders are now also being compensated with 51 cents. The consortium had long since secured the 67 percent required for the success of the takeover bid.
(Report by Christina Amann, Jan C. Schwartz, Alexander Hübner, edited by Olaf Brenner. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at [email protected] (for politics and the economy) or [email protected] ( for companies and markets).)
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