Volkswagen Group

Volkswagen Group (parent company Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft) is a German multinational automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany. It designs, engineers, manufactures and distributes passenger cars, commercial vehicles, motorcycles, engines and turbomachinery, and offers related services including financing, leasing and fleet management. It is the world’s largest motor vehicle manufacturer by 2011 unit sales and has maintained the largest market share in Europe for over two decades.

Volkswagen Group sells passenger cars under the Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, SEAT, Škoda and Volkswagen marques; motorcycles under the Ducati brand; and commercial vehicles under the MAN, Scania and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles marques. It is divided into two primary divisions, the Automotive Division and the Financial Services Division, and consists of approximately 340 subsidiary companies. The company has operations in approximately 150 countries and operates 94 production facilities across 24 countries. It holds a 19.9% non-controlling shareholding in Suzuki Motor Corporation.

Volkswagen was founded in 1937 to manufacture the car which would become known as the Beetle. The company's production grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s and in 1965 it acquired Auto Union, which subsequently produced the first post-war Audi models. Volkswagen launched a new generation of front-wheel drive vehicles in the 1970s, including the Passat, Polo and Golf; the latter became its bestseller. Volkswagen acquired a controlling stake in the Spanish carmaker SEAT in 1986, making it the first non-German marque of the company, and acquired control of Škoda in 1994, of Bentley, Lamborghini and Bugatti in 1998 and of Porsche in 2012.

Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft is a public company and has a primary listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, where it is a constituent of the DAX index, and secondary listings on the London Stock Exchange, Luxembourg Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange and SIX Swiss Exchange. As of September 2012 20% of the voting rights by the State of Lower Saxony.