“Volocopter Finds Buyer at 12th Hour!”

The Ger­man eVTOL soap opera con­tin­ues as news broke late last week that Volo­copter has found a new buy­er at the 12th hour. Ger­man news out­let, wiwo.de, report­ed that an Aus­tri­an air­craft man­u­fac­tur­er, Dia­mond Air­craft, is tak­ing over the eVTOL com­pa­ny. Dia­mond is owned by the Chi­nese bil­lion-dol­lar com­pa­ny Wan­feng, a sup­pli­er of car parts. Present­ly, details are scant as Volo­copter has made no com­ment on this poten­tial sale. 

wiwo.de writes, “Sources close to the com­pa­ny say the new own­er wants to sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce the team as a first step. Accord­ing to the report, only around 160 of the approx­i­mate­ly 500 employ­ees will con­tin­ue to work at the eVTOL com­pa­ny.”

Volo­copter: “Ger­man Court Opens Insol­ven­cy Pro­ceed­ings”

Dia­mond pri­mar­i­ly pro­duces motor glid­ers and small air­craft, with a prod­uct range aimed at pri­vate buy­ers. The com­pa­ny has been exper­i­ment­ing with craft that have a hybrid dri­ve for some years. There­fore, there are ‘syn­er­gies’ sur­round­ing this poten­tial sale.

Wan­feng Avi­a­tion Indus­try bought Dia­mond in 2017 after many years of finan­cial crises and then filled the man­age­ment board with its own staff.

The Aus­tri­ans are prof­itable and achieved sales of EUR210 mil­lion in 2023. The com­pa­ny employs over 600 peo­ple and has a loca­tion in Egels­bach, Hesse, about 100 kilo­me­tres from Volo­copter’s HQ in Bruch­sal.

Read­ing between the media lines, there is some scep­ti­cism of this sale. Ger­man media web­site, electrive.com writes that Volo­copter “has appar­ent­ly found an investor… the deal has not yet been offi­cial­ly con­firmed.”

After the recent Lil­i­um deba­cle of buy-out promis­es, is this once bit­ten twice shy for the Ger­man eVTOL indus­try? There­fore, with lit­tle news appear­ing and with no con­fir­ma­tion from Volo­copter, it is very much fin­gers-crossed.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.volocopter.com/en

News Source: https://www.wiwo.de/

(Top image: Voloc­i­ty in Flight)

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