Greve alargada a mais três setores e contratos a prazo a três anos

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A Porsche, esse conhecido pequeno construtor de carros pequenos, apresenta lucros em 2008 superiores às vendas, graças aos resultados financeiros com a cena do short squeeze da VW.

No meio da confusão há sempre quem se safe...

While the rest of the industry swooned, Porsche CEO Wiedeking outsmarted the hedge funds and bought VW

(Fortune Magazine) -- These are brutally difficult times for automakers worldwide, but as crises go, this one could be a lot worse for Wendelin Wiedeking, Porsche's chief executive for the past 16 years.

Thanks to an astute mixture of long-term strategic foresight and short-term financial wizardry, Wiedeking has Porsche headed into this downturn in an extraordinarily strong position. The company is sitting on a $20 billion mountain of capital - more money than the U.S. government is injecting into GM, Ford, and Chrysler combined.

More important, Wiedeking, 58, has secured Porsche's future through an audacious David vs. Goliath takeover of Volkswagen, Germany' largest automaker and a company that has so far weathered the crisis better than most of its peers. "Wiedeking very cleverly purchased a life insurance policy for Porsche by buying VW," says Peter Schmidt, an auto consultant based in Britain. "He's a brilliant, focused leader who grabbed VW for peanuts and is making a fortune out of it."

Schmidt is referring to a feat that guarantees Wiedeking a place in the record books: Porsche's profits before taxes of $11.6 billion in the fiscal year ended in July were actually larger than its total revenues from sales of $10.2 billion. Not even Google has profits exceeding 100%. Only 12% of Porsche's profits came from making cars. The remainder is the fruit of a brilliantly sophisticated stock-hedging strategy (yes, sometimes they do work) that was hatched by CFO Holgar Hrter before Porsche started buying into VW, and ended up panicking short-sellers and enriching the automaker.

The gambit also let it acquire VW stock at a price well below market. On Jan. 5, Porsche announced that it now owns just over 50% of VW and holds options that would raise that stake to 74%. The joke making the rounds in industry circles is that Porsche is a hedge fund attached to a car company. Porsche isn't laughing. It says it hedged only to further its strategic goals as an automaker.

As a manufacturer producing just 100,000 cars per year for well-heeled clients, including bankers and hedge fund managers, Porsche could now be in a dire situation. But though its sales have slumped in recent months along with the rest of the industry's, the company seems poised to grow. This is a testament to Wiedeking's leadership, which has transformed the German sports car maker from a business that was close to collapse when he took it over in 1992 to the world's most consistently profitable automaker and the firm regularly chosen by German managers as the nation's best run.