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Volocopter Enters into Administration: “Is Geely Waiting in the Wings?”

On Decem­ber 26th, Ger­man-based eVTOL com­pa­ny, Volo­copter filed an appli­ca­tion for the open­ing of insol­ven­cy pro­ceed­ings with the Karl­sruhe Local Court, reports a press release. It was approved the fol­low­ing day with Tobias Wahl from the law firm, Anchor Recht­san­wäl­tege­sellschaft, being appoint­ed as the insol­ven­cy admin­is­tra­tor. 

Accord­ing to the eVTOL com­pa­ny, busi­ness oper­a­tions will con­tin­ue dur­ing the pro­ceed­ings with the aim “to devel­op a restruc­tur­ing con­cept by the end of Feb­ru­ary and imple­ment it with investors.” Wahl stat­ed, “The com­pa­ny needs financ­ing to take the final steps towards mar­ket entry.”

Mean­while, Dirk Hoke, CEO of Volo­copter, remains upbeat about the company’s future. “We are ahead of our indus­try peers in our tech­no­log­i­cal, flight test, and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion progress. That makes us an attrac­tive com­pa­ny to invest in while we organ­ise our­selves with inter­nal restruc­tur­ing.” There are even plans to launch the VoloC­i­ty on the mar­ket this year.

Volo­copter is close to obtain­ing type cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and launch­ing its urban eVTOL, VoloC­i­ty. Yet, giv­en the huge amounts of mon­ey required for this next crit­i­cal stage, investors are hard to find.

The com­pa­ny says, “Despite recent inten­sive fundrais­ing efforts, find­ing a viable solu­tion to main­tain reg­u­lar oper­a­tions out­side of insol­ven­cy pro­ceed­ings has not been pos­si­ble.” But points out, “With one of the low­est burn rates in the indus­try, Volo­copter has suc­cess­ful­ly oper­at­ed in an extreme­ly dif­fi­cult finan­cial envi­ron­ment.”

Tobias Wahl (Cred­it: Anchor Recht­san­wäl­tege­sellschaft)

Enter Chi­na-based Geely, where rumours have been swirling around since late last year, of the car company’s inter­est in tak­ing over the Ger­man eVTOL set-up.

In ear­ly Novem­ber, media web­site Bloomberg report­ed that Geely was look­ing to acquire Volo­copter and pur­chase around 85 per­cent of its shares. Ger­hard Sturm, the founder of fan man­u­fac­tur­er EBM-Papst, is also alleged­ly said to be involved in a poten­tial deal. 

Last year was a dif­fi­cult one for the eVTOL firm. The huge­ly dis­ap­point­ing fail­ure of not being allowed to offer com­mer­cial flights over Paris dur­ing the Olympic Games, part­ly due to polit­i­cal rea­sons, lead­ing to just one manned demon­stra­tion flight in a Paris sub­urb, using the ten-year-old pre­de­ces­sor mod­el 2X instead of the cur­rent mod­el; then fol­lowed by an abject dis­in­ter­est from Ger­man gov­ern­ment author­i­ties to offer any finan­cial help to one of their top cut­ting-edge avi­a­tion com­pa­nies, was a dou­ble blow.

Volo­copter is viewed, per­haps, as the lead­ing eVTOL air­craft devel­op­er in Europe. The com­pa­ny has received approval to man­u­fac­ture the VoloC­i­ty and built a fac­to­ry in Bruschal, Ger­many, estab­lished a pilot train­ing pro­gram and con­duct­ed pilot­ed pub­lic dis­plays of pro­to­types.

Found­ed in 2011, Volo­copter is devel­op­ing the VoloC­i­ty air taxi for short trips in urban areas. The mul­ti-rotor eVTOL air­craft can car­ry two pas­sen­gers up to 22 miles with a top speed of 68mph. 18 rotors pro­pel the air­craft which has been designed with a low noise sig­na­ture for oper­a­tions in urban areas. Accord­ing to the Ger­man com­pa­ny, it has more than 500 pre-orders for the VoloC­i­ty.

Geely HQ (Cred­it: Geely)

While the out­come remains bright for the com­pa­ny, if Geely does step in, it will be a sad day for Europe when its top eVTOL com­pa­ny, close to type cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and poten­tial com­mer­cial oper­a­tions, should be owned by Chi­na. What does that say about Euro­pean avi­a­tion ambi­tions, espe­cial­ly after the recent finan­cial tri­als and tribu­la­tions of Lil­i­um?

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.volocopter.com/en

(Top image: Volo­copter) 

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