Volkswagen Group's research and development costs in 2025 were 19.4 billion euros, and at 31 December 2025 its research and development departments employed 62,954 people, 9.5 percent of a workforce of around 663,000.
That gets a vendor interested. Here is what decides whether you have a business: the Group delivered 9.0 million vehicles in 2025 across ten brands from five European countries and 111 production facilities. Nothing here is bought once. It is bought by a brand, a plant or a subsidiary, and it has to beat what an internal engineering team or an already-qualified tier one supplier could deliver inside an existing part number.
How the buying process actually runs
There is one mandatory front door, and it is not a sales channel. The Group runs the ONE.Konzern Business Plattform, abbreviated ONE.KBP, at vwgroupsupply.com, in place since 2003, and registration on it is a prerequisite for business with Group companies. It is keyed to your D-U-N-S number, so the entity you register is the entity you can trade as. The B2B User Agreement must be accepted electronically, then printed, signed and couriered, because only the original hard copy is considered for approval.
Your database entry decides who can find you. You pick material groups from a tree split between production and non-production material. Choose carelessly and the buyers you were aiming at cannot see you.
Automotive qualification gates are the real timeline. Formel Q, the Group's quality management agreement with suppliers, requires an annual self audit by certified VDA 6.3 auditors, valid a maximum of twelve months. Information security runs on TISAX, created by the German automotive association VDA and operated by the ENX Association. The Group also publishes customer-specific requirements under IATF 16949. And the Sustainability Rating, the S-Rating, has applied Group-wide since 2019 to direct suppliers with high sustainability risk: without a positive one you are generally not eligible for awarding. None of this starts the week the commercial conversation goes well.
Plant technology is not corporate IT. If what you sell touches a line, a press shop or a logistics yard, your buyer is not the Group IT function, your qualification is production-side, and your change window is a shutdown. Selling operational technology into a brand's manufacturing engineering organisation and selling corporate software into Group IT are two different paths, and confusing them wastes a year.
Who owns what, so you know where your deal belongs
You will not be selling to these people. Their remits tell you which part of the Group your deal sits in, and whose priorities it must align with several levels down.
| Name | Role on the Board of Management | What it means for a vendor |
|---|---|---|
| Dr. Oliver Blume | Chair, and the Sport Luxury brand group | Sets Group strategy and chairs the supervisory board of software subsidiary CARIAD SE |
| Hauke Stars | IT | Group-wide IT, data and process management. The remit for corporate software, not plant floor systems |
| Thomas Schmall-von Westerholt | Technology, and Chair of the Board of Management of Volkswagen Group Components | Components, manufacturing technology and batteries. He chairs PowerCo SE's supervisory board |
| Dr. Arno Antlitz | Finance and Operations | Where a multi-year commitment has to make sense. He chairs Volkswagen Financial Services AG |
| Thomas Schäfer | Core brand group, and Chair of the Board of Management of the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand | The volume brands. He chairs the SEAT and Škoda Auto supervisory boards, so a Core deal has three brand organisations in it |
The other members are Dr. Gernot Döllner, who runs the Progressive brand group and chairs the Board of Management of AUDI AG; Ralf Brandstätter, China; and Dr. Manfred Döss, Integrity and Legal Affairs. Erika Rasch joins for Human Resources on 1 October 2026, from the Robert Bosch Group where she latterly led global HR; Thomas Schäfer has held that remit since 5 July 2025.
Board composition from the Volkswagen Group Annual Report 2025 and the Group's own 2026 announcements, verified 11 September 2026. Senior roles change. Verify at source before using any name.
Why you cannot sell into Volkswagen from the bottom
On 3 September 2026 the Supervisory Board unanimously approved the Future Plan 2030. It targets a nine percent operating margin by 2030, 37 billion euros of overhead cost and 135 billion euros of combined capital expenditure and research and development for 2027 to 2031. It halves the model portfolio by 2035, cuts offering complexity by around 75 percent, streamlines the shareholding portfolio by around a third, and involves a Group-wide workforce adjustment of approximately 50,000 positions including management. It also records that European capacity exceeds demand by more than 500,000 units and that future production allocation for the Emden, Zwickau, Hanover and Neckarsulm plants cannot currently be secured from 2031 to 2034.
Read that as a seller, not as news. Every line makes a new external cost harder to defend, and nobody three levels down carries a new vendor through it on their own signature. That is exactly the level where cold outreach gets its friendliest replies.
The layer that matters sits below the published names
The people who sponsor purchases are brand CIOs, manufacturing engineering and plant OT leads, platform owners at CARIAD SE and PowerCo SE, and commodity buyers who hold your material group. That layer is unusually hard to map here. The Group runs four brand groups, Core, Progressive, Sport Luxury and Trucks, each with its own board and its own buying, on top of a Group purchasing organisation and separately governed subsidiaries. The same capability can have an owner in Wolfsburg, another in Ingolstadt and another at a single plant, and they may not agree. Working out the real buying committee is most of the job, and it is why multithreading is not optional here.
The Supervisory Board is a published second-degree map
Volkswagen AG has two boards. The Board of Management, the Vorstand, runs the business; the Supervisory Board, the Aufsichtsrat, appoints and monitors it. Nobody sits on both, so a pitch aimed at "the board" is aimed at nothing in particular. The Supervisory Board has 20 members, ten shareholder and ten employee representatives under the German Codetermination Act, seven of the latter elected by the workforce and three trade union representatives. Under Article 11(1) of the Articles of Association, Lower Saxony may appoint two shareholder representatives while it holds at least 15 percent of the ordinary shares. On the shareholder side:
- Hans Dieter Pötsch, Chair, re-elected and confirmed after the 2026 Annual General Meeting. Chair of the Board of Management of Porsche Automobil Holding SE, chairs the TRATON SE supervisory board, and sits on those of Bertelsmann SE and Co. KGaA, AUDI AG, Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG and Wolfsburg AG.
- Dr. Wolfgang Porsche, Chair of the supervisory boards of both Porsche Automobil Holding SE and Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG.
- Dr. Hans Michel Piëch, Deputy Chair of the Porsche Automobil Holding SE supervisory board, a member here since 2009.
- Dr. Ferdinand Oliver Porsche, Board of Management of Familie Porsche AG Beteiligungsgesellschaft.
- Olaf Lies, Minister President of Lower Saxony, delegated until 2028, also on the Meyer Werft GmbH supervisory board, and Julia Willie Hamburg, Lower Saxony's Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs, delegated until 2028.
- Mohammed Saif Al-Sowaidi, Chief Executive Officer of the Qatar Investment Authority, Chair of Harrods Group (Holding) Limited and Qatar Holding LLC, board member of Ooredoo and Qatar National Bank.
- Dr. Hessa Sultan al Jaber, former Minister of Information and Communications Technology of Qatar, on the boards of MEEZA and Trio Investment.
- Susanne Wiegand, Chair of the Audit Committee, also on the supervisory boards of Brenntag SE and BWI GmbH, and Dr. Günther Horvath, attorney, also on the Porsche Automobil Holding SE supervisory board.
The employee bench is just as useful and almost never worked: Christiane Benner, Deputy Chair and Chair of IG Metall, also on the Aumovio SE supervisory board; Daniela Cavallo, Chair of the General and Group Works Councils, also on the supervisory boards of TRATON SE, PowerCo SE, Škoda Auto and SEAT; Karina Schnur, works council chair at MAN Truck and Bus SE and TRATON; and Rita Beck of the AUDI AG Ingolstadt works council and the CARIAD SE supervisory board.
Read that as a seller. If anyone in your network is senior at Porsche SE, Porsche AG, Audi, TRATON, MAN, Škoda, SEAT, CARIAD, PowerCo, Bertelsmann, Meyer Werft, Brenntag, Harrods, Qatar National Bank, Ooredoo, Aumovio or IG Metall, there is a checkable two-hop path to a Volkswagen supervisory board member.
Why co-determination changes the plan, not just the org chart
Two provisions make this account unlike a US industrial. Under the Articles of Association, establishing or relocating a production facility needs prior Supervisory Board consent and a two-thirds majority of that board, so with half the seats held by employee representatives, footprint decisions cannot be taken over labour's objection. Separately, resolutions that would normally need a three-quarters majority at the general meeting need more than four-fifths. At the end of 2025 Porsche Automobil Holding SE held 53.3 percent of the voting rights, Lower Saxony 20.0 percent and Qatar Holding LLC 17.0 percent, with 9.7 percent in free float.
Practically: anything touching headcount, shift patterns, worker monitoring or productivity measurement acquires a works council stakeholder early. Raise it in the first meeting rather than the fifth.
Other routes in
Brand and subsidiary alumni. Volkswagen does not publish a formal alumni network, so do not plan around one. The equivalent pool is people who have moved between Audi, Porsche, Škoda, SEAT, Bentley, Ducati, MAN, Scania, CARIAD and PowerCo.
Tier one suppliers already carrying part numbers. An established tier one is already inside the qualification system you are trying to enter, and can route you to the engineering team with the problem, often because it makes their own scope stickier.
Senior hires from elsewhere in German industry. Erika Rasch joins from the Robert Bosch Group in October 2026, and new executives bring networks.
Your own investors and board. At this deal size the useful introduction often comes from a director who sits on another board with someone relevant. Finding which path exists is what relationship intelligence is for.
And then you have to get to your own connector
This step kills more introductions than the external ask does. Suppose the best path runs through one of your own directors who knows someone at TRATON or Bertelsmann. You have to get them to prioritise it, write something credible, and spend a piece of a relationship built over years. Ask twice in a quarter and you will not be asked again. Most companies have no idea who else internally is already asking that connector about this account.
Three rules for the introduction itself
Ask for the brand or the plant, not the Group. "An introduction to whoever owns manufacturing IT at the Zwickau plant" is actionable. "An introduction to Volkswagen" is not.
Write the blurb your connector will forward. They will not write your pitch. Give them a paragraph they can send without editing. The forwardable blurb is the whole craft.
A warm path starts the clock, it does not skip it. You still register on ONE.KBP, still clear Formel Q and VDA 6.3, still hold a TISAX assessment, still take an S-Rating. What you get is a real conversation with someone who has a problem and a budget, months earlier.
See the warm paths into Volkswagen Group
Everything above describes the problem: ten brands, four brand groups, and a supervisory board that can veto a plant. What it does not tell you is which of your own relationships already reaches inside. That is a question about your network, not theirs, and it is the one most teams answer from memory.
Boomerang maps the warm paths your company already has into accounts like Volkswagen Group, across your team, your customers, your board and investors, and your partners. It then drafts the ask, routes it through the right connector and tracks it to a booked meeting. Book a 15-minute walkthrough and see it run against your own target accounts.
Frequently asked questions
How do you become a supplier to Volkswagen Group?
Register on the ONE.Konzern Business Plattform, the Group's B2B supplier platform at vwgroupsupply.com, which has been in place since 2003 and is a prerequisite for business with Group companies. The six-step process runs on your D-U-N-S number, requires a named individual registrar with a company email domain, and includes a B2B User Agreement that must be accepted electronically and then printed, signed and couriered, because only the original is considered for approval. You then populate a supplier database entry including your ability range, chosen from material group trees split between production and non-production material, and nominate a Company Administrator. Registration makes you findable. It does not generate demand.
Who makes technology buying decisions at Volkswagen Group?
Purchases originate in a brand, a plant or a subsidiary, not centrally. Group-wide IT, data, organisational development and process management sit with Hauke Stars, the Board of Management member for IT. Manufacturing technology, components and batteries sit with Thomas Schmall-von Westerholt, who also chairs Volkswagen Group Components and the supervisory board of PowerCo SE. Vehicle software sits largely with CARIAD SE, whose supervisory board is chaired by CEO Oliver Blume. The budget and the problem usually live several levels below all of them, inside one of the four brand groups: Core, Progressive, Sport Luxury and Trucks.
What certifications do you need to sell to Volkswagen?
For most categories, more than one. Formel Q is the Group's quality management agreement with suppliers and requires an annual supplier self audit conducted by certified VDA 6.3 auditors, valid for a maximum of twelve months. Information security runs on TISAX, the assessment exchange created by the German automotive association VDA and operated by the ENX Association. The Group also publishes customer-specific requirements under IATF 16949. Separately, the Sustainability Rating, or S-Rating, has applied Group-wide since 2019 to direct suppliers with high sustainability risk and a corresponding size, based on a Self-Assessment Questionnaire, and a supplier that does not meet the requirements is generally not eligible for awarding.
How does co-determination affect selling to Volkswagen?
Directly. The Supervisory Board of Volkswagen AG has 20 members, ten shareholder and ten employee representatives under the German Codetermination Act, of whom seven are employees elected by the workforce and three are trade union representatives. The Articles of Association require a two-thirds majority of the Supervisory Board for resolutions on establishing and relocating production facilities, so plant footprint decisions cannot be taken over labour's objection. In practice, anything you sell that touches headcount, shift patterns, worker monitoring or productivity measurement acquires a works council stakeholder early, and it is better to raise that yourself than to have it raised for you.
Why is a warm introduction worth more at Volkswagen than a cold email?
Because of arithmetic and gates rather than anything about the individuals. The Future Plan 2030, approved by the Supervisory Board on 3 September 2026, targets 37 billion euros of overhead cost, halves the model portfolio by 2035, cuts offering complexity by around 75 percent and involves a workforce adjustment of approximately 50,000 positions. In that environment a new external line item needs a sponsor senior enough to defend it, and cold outreach lands most easily at exactly the level that lacks that standing. A message forwarded by someone the recipient already trusts arrives pre-qualified, and gets you a conversation in which the internal alternative is actually discussed rather than silently chosen.
