Ducati will stay Ducati, Audi says
Audi may have taken over Ducati, but they won’t take Ducati from neither the workers nor their fans, assuring that the Italian brand will live on under the guide of the German brand.
That guarantee comes straight from Audi AG’s CEO Ruper Stadler, who gave a motivational speech in front of the entire Ducati workforce – which included Ducati’s President and CEO Gabriele Del Torchio – at their factory in Bologna.
He also have a little bit of insight into why a car manufacturer with no true ties to Ducati chose to take over the brand. He said that the Volkswagen group was impressed by the “extraordinary engineering artistry, passion, precision, performance and the sheer joy of living” that Ducati stands for.
There were also mentions of joint opportunities related to high performance engines and lightweight manufacturing, but he made it a point of stressing the fact that both Audi and Ducati are driven by the same passion and they won’t detract from each other, but rather complement and act as an inspiration to each other.
From a more hard cold financial point of view, it easy to understand why Audi, and the Volkswagen Group on the whole, was interested in Ducati. Their bikes are being sold in over eighty countries around the world, and that’s one market that nobody would be amiss to have a stake in, and the Volkswagen group has made clear its wish to increase the number of its automotive and motorcycle companies with the purchase of the rest of the Porsche Automobil Holding SE’s car making business.
Audi paid about $1.1 billion or 860 million Euros for Ducati.
