Although it may seem obvious that Volvo Trucks and Volvo Cars are united, what is certain is that a long time ago that it is not so. It has happened several times in history that large companies have been distributed in pieces that have ended up in various hands. It is the case of AB Volvo, the parent company. Now I’ll just link the logos and the image corportativa, little more.
When Volvo begins to market cars, the idea of a truck was already in the minds of its managers. In 1928 appears the first range of trucks, series LV, just a year after the appearance of the first car of Volvo. Both divisions were together until 1998, having acquired in the way of other truck manufacturers.
In that year Ford Motor Company was made with Volvo Cars and their destinations were separated. The Swedish brand of cars remained within the american group until the great restructuring the automotive industries in the united States by the economic crisis. Ford wanted to drop ballast and sold Volvo Cars to a chinese manufacturer in 2010, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., or just Geely.
Geely, a company founded by Li Shufu, he began dedicating himself to the spare parts for refrigerators in 1986. Geely acquired a business of manufacturing of motorcycles owned public bankruptcy in 1994, and was initiated into the world of cars in 1997. The time has passed to be the higher group car chinese in private hands.
When Ford sold it to Shufu the brand Volvo, many in the industry saw it as a possible disaster. This journalist was also very skeptical about it, knowing that Geely had shamelessly copied designs from other. The time took us out of our error, Volvo has not lost precisely cache and has pulled ahead with their own technology, reducing development costs by sharing them with Geely.
while Volvo Trucks and Volvo Cars are not going to merge as a same brand, whether it will be related to the same owner. The actions that Li Shufu wants to buy are not enough to buy the truck company or to control it, but they do have weight in their future decisions as a member of the board of directors, will be the majority shareholder.
Volvo Trucks has moved in the past few years very well in social networks with videos that go beyond your traditional audience (truck drivers and transportation professionals)
last Wednesday, Geely announced the company’s intention to acquire the firm Cevian Capital AB, a part, 8.2% of the capital and 15.6% of the votes. The operation is valued at 3.250 million euros per Bloomberg, the amount next to that ahead of Reuters, below 3,000 million.
Geely would be with 88.5 million shares of Class A and 78,8 million shares of Class B. even Though it will be the majority shareholder of Volvo Trucks, the company Industrivarden AB has more rights to vote because you have more shares “Class A” and therefore more voting power.
Cevian has held shares in Volvo Trucks, since September 2006, when I was done with the 5 per cent of the votes. Until last week the investment has had a return of 181% with their shares of “Class B”. According to Gardell, these 11 years, as investors in the company Swedish truck has had a return of approximately 2,000 million euros at the exchange.
As with Geely within the shareholder base, Volvo Trucks to benefit by synergies technologies in electrification, driving, autonomous, connectivity, etc, The world of heavy transport is not going to rid it of these developments, and Volvo Trucks can not stay behind, it is the second european manufacturer of industrial vehicles.
Almost at the same time that Volvo Cars was in the hands of Ford, the truck division formed a cartel with DAF, Daimler, Iveco, MAN and -presumably – Scania. Truck drivers who purchased a model of more than 6 tons paid up to a 10% under that covenant against the competition.
MAN was exonerated of his involvement to be in first to snitch on their partners before the european authorities. The corresponding sanction for Volvo Trucks was 670 million euros. Apart is the amount of unwrapping all the trucks that have been brought to trial. According to Fernadismer, in Spain there were over 1,500 affected.
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