Porsche after IPO: 9.55 billion euros for VW shareholders

The Porsche IPO created a ring of treasure for the shareholders of parent company Volkswagen. You should now receive 9.55 billion euros as a special dividend. The Porsche and Pitch families in particular benefit from this.

As a result of the Porsche IPO, Volkswagen Group is paying an additional 9.55 billion euros to its shareholders, above all to the Porsche and Piech families. By invitation of the Extraordinary General Meeting to be held on 16 December in Berlin, VW is proposing a special dividend of EUR 19.06 per share, which was published in the afternoon.

As promised, the group is giving away 49 percent of the proceeds from sports car subsidiary Porsche AG’s successful IPO. The family holding company Porsche SE, which is controlled by the descendants of the company’s founder Ferdinand Porsche, can count on three billion euros, which it intends to invest immediately in additional ordinary shares in Porsche AG.

Porsche SE is rising

As stated in the invitation to the Annual General Meeting, the special dividend is payable on January 9, 2023. The distribution is a condition for Porsche SE, the group’s holding company, to increase its common stake in Porsche AG from 17.5 percent to 25 percent.

Financially, it’s a zero-sum game: The 7.5 percent package that the holding company takes from Volkswagen earns the same amount from dividends. Porsche SE financed the first tranche with debt. Families thus get direct access to the Stuttgart sports car maker, which they had to sell after a failed attempt to take over Volkswagen.

major shareholders are

VW shareholders’ acceptance is considered a formality: the majority of voting VW ordinary shares held by the Porsche SE. And the other two major Volkswagen shareholders also gain massively: Lower Saxony (11.8 percent) position collects 1.13 billion euros, Qatar’s state holding company (10.5 percent) collects a billion. This is more than half the amount put into Porsche AG’s shares when Qatar went public.

Overall, Porsche’s IPO – the largest in Germany in more than 25 years – and the sale of shares to the Volkswagen family’s holding company will generate more than 19 billion euros in profit. the portion of the money that the Wolfsburg Group holds Volkswagen’s conversion to an electric car maker should flow.

The extraordinary general meeting is the first in three years that Volkswagen intends to hold in person again. The group has rented the Berlin Congress Center “Citycube” for this purpose. Since 2020, shareholder meetings – like almost all listed companies – have only happened virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic.