Executive Profile: Christian Bauer, Volocopter’s Chief Financial and Commercial Officer

The next instal­ment of our Exec­u­tive Pro­files is now live! This time, we put the ques­tions to Chris­t­ian Bauer, Volo­copter’s Chief Finan­cial and Com­mer­cial Offi­cer.

We start­ed these inter­views as an infor­mal way to get to know the industry’s thought lead­ers, inno­va­tors and influ­encers. Every­thing from their favourite bit of advice, book and hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion, to their top three chal­lenges for the mar­ket and the biggest devel­op­ment to hap­pen this year.

If you’re work­ing in the indus­try and would like to be fea­tured in these inter­views, we’d love to hear from you! Please email editorial@evtolinsights.com and one of the team will get back in touch.

–/

Favourite hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion?

Mal­lor­ca. I love the good weath­er, beach, ocean and gen­er­al­ly good mood on the island. Espe­cial­ly in grey Ger­man win­ters it’s a real ener­gy boost to spend a week there.

Favourite book or film?

Oh, wow this is a hard one. I love futur­is­tic books and movies. Specif­i­cal­ly worth men­tion­ing
“Minor­i­ty Report” and “Obliv­ion”; such movies in my view inspire how a future life or
tech­nol­o­gy and trans­porta­tion might look like.

Best bit of advice you’ve been giv­en?

There are two: First, do things step by step, it is not worth doing big jumps and falling back
again. Sec­ond: Be your­self and in crit­i­cal sit­u­a­tions lis­ten to your “gut”.

If you could invite three guests to din­ner, alive or dead, who would they be and why?

Barack Oba­ma: He comes to mind, because of his inspir­ing speech­es. It’s rare nowa­days to find such charis­ma and elo­quence in politi­cians.

War­ren Buf­fet: would real­ly like to learn more about his invest­ment strate­gies and I think he would make a good investor in Volo­copter

Final­ly Bertha Benz: the pio­neer and first car dri­ver of the world. I was always curi­ous to learn more about the details of her first jour­ney of Carl Benz’s “Motor­wa­gen” in Baden-Würt­tem­berg.

I believe the three guest would be a great and inspi­ra­tional din­ner team.

Favourite car?
Elec­tric, ful­ly elec­tric

Describe Volo­copter in five words?

Pio­neer­ing, pas­sion­ate, inno­v­a­tive, dri­ven, prag­mat­ic

What is Volo­copter’s vision for the UAM mar­ket?

Sus­tain­able mobil­i­ty is one of the big chal­lenges for humankind. UAM can be one of the solu­tions to this large prob­lem. The space above cities is under­uti­lized. To access this vast oppor­tu­ni­ty, a full ecosys­tem is nec­es­sary.

This is not only true for Volo­copter, but also for the entire indus­try. Tak­ing that into account, our vision is to be a sus­tain­able, pub­lic trans­port modal­i­ty that can seam­less­ly com­ple­ment the trans­port sys­tems we have in place today.

We want our cus­tomers to move from their ori­gin to their des­ti­na­tion as eas­i­ly as pos­si­ble. This could be in a form of one sin­gle book­ing or tick­et on an app, or a nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem with pre­cise trans­fer times between modal­i­ties. The impor­tant thing is that UAM becomes a viable option of choice for the cus­tomers as a means of get­ting around cities in the future.

How are devel­op­ments com­ing along?

We are on track to receive EASA type cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the VoloC­i­ty in the sum­mer of 2024.
Under EASA’s guid­ance, Volo­copter recent­ly went through our Crit­i­cal Design Review which
means that our prod­uct enters now in the final test­ing phase with the author­i­ties. On top
we make tremen­dous progress in our first tar­get cities.

Proud­est moment at Volo­copter so far?

Defin­i­tive­ly the moment we flew over Mari­na Bay, Sin­ga­pore in 2019. We were a tiny team and we pulled it off with our part­ners to real­ly demon­strate what it will be like to have ver­ti­ports and elec­tric air taxis fly­ing in cities. That was four years ago and it gave a huge boost to the entire indus­try!

What does a typ­i­cal day look like for you?

It’s what I love about my job, there is no typ­i­cal day. But I have some con­stants, I check in with my team every morn­ing, so we can con­tin­ue to push our projects con­tin­u­ous­ly and solve poten­tial block­ers in the morn­ing. Apart from that its meet­ings and nego­ti­a­tions with our many part­ners and investors to con­tin­ue push­ing our vision for­ward. And check­ing-in reg­u­lar­ly on progress of our prod­ucts, flight-test and pro­duc­tion – every day I can see more puz­zle pieces com­ing togeth­er for our com­mer­cial launch.

Most inter­est­ing sto­ry about the indus­try that you’ve read?

Well, I real­ly liked EASA’s (Euro­pean Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Agency, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion body) con­fir­ma­tion that they expect first eVTOLs to be cer­ti­fied in 2024. This clear­ly shows their lead­ing posi­tion in bring­ing this new mar­ket to life. You should def­i­nite­ly check out their lat­est pub­li­ca­tions.

Top three chal­lenges for the indus­try?

FINANCING:
With my CFO hat on, I must say it’s the glob­al econ­o­my that is impact­ing fundrais­ing. In 2021, the world was open­ing up after Covid lock­downs, invest­ment in new tech­nol­o­gy was boom­ing. With the cur­rent infla­tion, slight reces­sion, and the glob­al geopo­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, it’s become a chal­leng­ing mar­ket. Investors rather focus now on the mar­ket lead­ers and hid­den cham­pi­ons, which clear­ly puts us in a very good posi­tion, hav­ing raised more than EUR 200million the last six months.

CONNECTING AND SCALING:
UAM net­work – it’s often over­looked that UAM needs a work­ing ecosys­tem to func­tion prop­er­ly. For exam­ple, ver­ti­ports, approved U‑space cor­ri­dors for flights, dig­i­tal con­nec­tiv­i­ty, dif­fer­ent reg­u­la­to­ry approvals, city net­works, etc. Many are still very focused on the air­craft itself and all ele­ments sup­port­ing the air­craft in opreations are left behind. This needs to be imple­ment­ed quick­ly and cohe­sive­ly for the indus­try to thrive.

PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE:
Vary­ing degrees of UAM under­stand­ing, accep­tance, and progress in dif­fer­ent parts of the world. In addi­tion to the UAM net­work progress in my pre­vi­ous point, pub­lic accep­tance takes time. We have to be mind­ful that most peo­ple have not seen the air­craft in per­son. So, to pre­pare our­selves for com­mer­cial­iza­tion, we have to con­tin­ue as an indus­try to show how safe, con­ve­nient, and use­ful this new form of mobil­i­ty is for the pub­lic.

Where do you think the indus­try will be in the next five years?

We will see dif­fer­ent designs of UAM become com­mer­cial­ly avail­able for dif­fer­ent use cas­es. The indus­try will start to scale up, cre­ate new jobs, pro­vide new mobil­i­ty routes, and prove use­ful to the pub­lic. Cus­tomer feed­back will inform our indus­try and it will be excit­ing to see how far UAM will go.

How can peo­ple get in con­tact with Volo­copter?

We are present at many events and part of numer­ous work­ing groups in the indus­try, so its always easy to come up to us and have a con­ver­sa­tion. Alter­na­tive­ly, there is a con­tact form on our web­site and we are all present on LinkedIn.

Biggest indus­try devel­op­ment you think will hap­pen this year?

The next twelve months, I believe the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between the mar­ket lead­ers in eVTOL/ UAM
and the many fol­low­ers will become more vis­i­ble – over 300 con­cepts are under devel­op­ment with vast­ly dif­fer­ent use cas­es. Those who will prove first com­mer­cial rev­enues and a clear scal­ing path will ben­e­fit from first to mar­ket advan­tages – so there are very excit­ing times ahead of us.