Volocopter: “German Court Opens Insolvency Proceedings”

Once more Ger­man news web­site, www.electrive.com, leads the way with the lat­est update on Volocopter’s poten­tial insol­ven­cy and, oh dear oh dear, it is not look­ing good.

Only two weeks ago, the eVTOL com­pa­ny released an upbeat press release announc­ing a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Jet Sys­tems Héli­cop­tères Ser­vices, to bring eVTOL air­craft ser­vices to France. Obvi­ous­ly, this was a dis­trac­tion away from the ongo­ing finan­cial machi­na­tions behind the scenes. 

In an arti­cle pub­lished two days ago, electrive.com wrote, “The pro­vi­sion­al insol­ven­cy pro­ceed­ings at air taxi man­u­fac­tur­er Volo­copter are turn­ing into reg­u­lar insol­ven­cy pro­ceed­ings. The search for investors that began in Decem­ber is still ongo­ing, although a restruc­tur­ing con­cept was sup­posed to be in place by the end of Feb­ru­ary. Volo­copter’s future thus remains up in the air.”

Then an update was post­ed yes­ter­day on the site: “The approx­i­mate­ly 500 employ­ees of Volo­copter received their notice of ter­mi­na­tion on Mon­day as the Ger­man busi­ness pub­li­ca­tion, WirtschaftsWoche (WiWo), has learnt. The paper writes that all employ­ees were fired, effec­tive imme­di­ate­ly, and are to hand in their work equip­ment by Mon­day, of which the employ­ees were noti­fied via an inter­nal email.” 

The Volo­copter HR depart­ment wrote to its work­force. “With the fil­ing for insol­ven­cy and the asso­ci­at­ed release, a process is now begin­ning that is asso­ci­at­ed with time-crit­i­cal organ­i­sa­tion­al steps. As the insol­ven­cy ben­e­fit has already been exhaust­ed, the author­i­ty is to pay the remain­ing salaries as part of the equal­i­sa­tion scheme.” 

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

To add fur­ther pain to the wound, Volocopter’s CTO, Sebas­t­ian Mores, then bared his soul on Linkedin post­ing, “After years of ded­i­ca­tion and relent­less effort from an out­stand­ing team, we are now fac­ing the clos­ing of this chap­ter for Volocopter…The team is tru­ly world-class. Over the past decade, they have built invalu­able exper­tise across engi­neer­ing, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, IT, pro­duc­tion, flight test­ing, strat­e­gy, busi­ness devel­op­ment and beyond. I couldn’t be proud­er of what we have accom­plished togeth­er.”

He con­tin­ued, “This is a team that stands by one anoth­er, and I am com­mit­ted to doing my part to help find new oppor­tu­ni­ties for these tal­ent­ed pro­fes­sion­als.”

Mores con­cludes, “If your com­pa­ny is look­ing for top-tier tal­ent, reach out — I’d be hap­py to con­nect you with some incred­i­ble peo­ple.” It appears the recent rumour-mill stat­ing China’s Geely Auto­mo­bile com­pa­ny is going to buy Volo­copter was wrong.

Sebas­t­ian Mores

This is trag­ic only accen­tu­at­ed by the recent demise of Lil­i­um. Two lead­ing Euro­pean eVTOL com­pa­nies gone in just a few months.

How­ev­er, WiWo along with Mores does not see this as the final nail in the cof­fin. WiWo added, “While no suit­able buy­er has been found yet, a solu­tion is still being dis­cussed with var­i­ous exist­ing share­hold­ers and new investors.” A tiny, tiny glim­mer of hope, per­haps?

Just like with Lil­i­um, bar­ring a mir­a­cle, this is an extreme­ly ‘Sad, Sad Sit­u­a­tion.’

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.volocopter.com/en

News Source: www.electrive.com

(Top image: Voloc­i­ty Demon­stra­tion Flight dur­ing Paris Olympics))

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