Porsche SE is profiting strongly from the Volkswagen Group high

Thanks to the high profits of the Volkswagen Group, the VW holding company Porsche SE (PSE) also made excellent earnings in the first half of the year. The holding company posted an after-tax profit of a whopping 2.46 billion euros between January and the end of June, as the company announced in Stuttgart. In the same period of the previous year, the PSE was carried away by a weak VW balance sheet due to the crisis in the car industry at the beginning of the corona pandemic and had posted a loss of 329 million euros. PSE, which is controlled by the Porsche and Piëch families, holds a good 53 percent of the ordinary shares of Volkswagen. There are also a few other investments, but the business depends for the most part on the development of the VW Group. For the first half of the year, Volkswagen reported a record operating result and net profit after minorities of 8.1 billion euros. In view of the good first half of the year, PSE has recently started assuming higher profits for the year as a whole. This will probably be between 3.4 billion and 4.9 billion euros, it said. The forecast was updated at the end of July, previously the management around CEO and VW chief supervisor Hans Dieter Pötsch had assumed between 2.6 billion and 4.1 billion euros. Meanwhile, there is bad news from the USA. In connection with the diesel scandal, Porsche SE is confronted with a shareholder lawsuit. The lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court of New York State is directed against Porsche SE and former members of the board of management and supervisory board of Volkswagen as well as other people, according to the interim report published by Porsche SE on Tuesday. "The plaintiffs claim to be shareholders of Volkswagen AG and, with their lawsuit, are asserting alleged claims of Volkswagen AG on their behalf." The lawsuit - a so-called derivative action - is based, among other things, on alleged breaches of duty under the German Stock Corporation Act and the German Corporate Governance Code. The plaintiffs therefore want the court to determine that the defendant has breached its duties vis-à-vis Volkswagen. Porsche Automobil Holding SE (PSE) is the largest shareholder in Volkswagen with 53.3 percent of the voting rights. The pleading submitted to the court in April 2021 has not yet been served on the PSE. Therefore, one could not give any information about the amount of damages claimed, said a spokesman. A derivative action or shareholder derivative suit is brought against a third party by one or more shareholders on behalf of a company. That third party is often an insider, such as an officer, board member, or board member. Porsche SE and Volkswagen have already faced billions in investor lawsuits in courts in Braunschweig and Stuttgart. The plaintiffs accuse the companies of having informed them too late about the diesel scandal and are demanding compensation for losses in the price of their shares.