Porsche workers take home bonuses worth more than $1,500 each; ousted CEO Wendelin Wiedeking's golden parachute is $70 million.
These days, simply getting a paycheck seems to be good news, what with automakers and auto suppliers slashing jobs at a frantic pace. But the German sports car manufacturer, Porsche, is bucking the trend.
The Stuttgart-based maker recently lost a contentious battle for domination with Volkswagen AG, and there’s plenty of uncertainty about its future as it prepares to be folded into the industry giant’s vast empire. So, to keep its well-trained workforce from bolting, Porsche has announced it will hand out bonus checks of about $1,500 each to its 12,500 employees for the recently concluded fiscal year.
In other times, that would’ve been a distinct disappointment since the bonus figure will be down a hefty 71% from a year ago. But consider that Porsche may wind up one of the only major automaker handing out any bonuses at all during this, the worst global automotive downtown since the end of World War II.
Daimler AG, which operates Mercedes-Benz, Smart and Maybach, has postponed its $2,700 bonus for a year. And BMW has canceled its profit sharing program for the first time in 35 years.
Don’t even ask about Detroit’s Big Three, which once handed out checks that went into five figures as part of a union-negotiated profit sharing scheme.
Right now, the only other makers planning to hand out cash to their workers are Volkswagen and its semi-autonomous luxury unit, Audi, which will pay $7,500 and $4,700, respectively.
Porsche’s largesse might not be entirely altruistic. The maker has taken a fair bit of heat for it Quixote-esque bid to acquire VW, which ran up billions of dollars in debt for the small manufacturer. (It now faces a $7 billion pre-tax loss triggered by the write-down on VW shares and options.)
When that deal collapsed, it triggered the resignation of Wendelin Wiedeking, the chairman who had steered Porsche’s revival and who was taking home an uncharacteristically lavish pay package for his effort. Wiedeking’s golden parachute came to around $70 million – which will be about 3.5 times larger than the entire bonus payout to Porsche employees.