Griffiths: The Best Legacy and the Worst Inheritance

Barcelona"As I've always said, this company is the final destination of my career. You never know how it might go when you're at the top of a company, but for me it's my dream job, I don't want to be anywhere else. I have no other plans." These were the words Wayne Griffiths spoke on March 13 at the Martorell plant, when he presented Seat's 2024 results. Two weeks later, on March 31, in a brief statement, the company announced that Griffiths was stepping down as president of Seat and Cupra by his own decision, effective immediately, to undertake.

With a post in English on LinkedIn titled Friends forever He explained that he was leaving the Volkswagen Group after 37 years, with a tribute to his colleagues and friends, and to avoid possible rumors, he made it clear that he was leaving "happy and in better shape than ever." True to form, a quote from David Bowie: "I don't know where I'll go from here, but I promise it won't be boring." And one hashtagThe best is yet to come. This isn't the first time Griffiths has suddenly left a position. He did the same with the presidency of the employers' association Anfac. Fed up with the Spanish government's failure to make a strong commitment to electric cars, he stepped down from the organization's presidency overnight.

Griffiths, who before becoming president of Seat and Cupra was vice president of marketing and sales—in fact, he has always been involved in this world, as his father owned a dealership—also knew how to win over the company's workforce. Aside from the exceptional earnings report of €1,800 for each employee over the last two years, he signed the 20th collective bargaining agreement in 2022, which ensured the continuity of all the company's work centers—Martorell, Barcelona, and El Prat de Llobregat.

The assessment of Griffiths' time at Seat leaves a double interpretation: has led the company to its all-time highs in production, sales, operating profits and model range. But, having reached the top, he leaves behind the company's biggest challenges: surviving the transition to electric cars. Griffiths leaves just as Seat—along with its parent company, Volkswagen—is making the largest industrial investment ever in Spain: €10 billion, which includes the Sagunto battery plant and the transformation of the Martorell (Seat) and Landaben (Navarra) plants to manufacture electric cars.

Electrification is the company's great future challenge. "Seat put Spain on wheels, and now it will put it on electric wheels," Griffiths has tirelessly repeated. But the commitment to electric vehicles has taken its toll. Industry sources point to tariffs on the Tavascan model as one of the key factors in Wayne Griffiths' departure from the company. The Cupra Tavascan is an electric SUV manufactured at a Volkswagen Group plant in China, a car that, due to the trade war, is taxed at 20%. So far, Seat has not managed to get Brussels to withdraw—or at least reduce—the tariffs. If the tariff is passed on to the sale price, the car, which costs around €50,000, becomes too expensive to succeed in the market. If the company assumes the cost of the tariffs, it will end up losing money on each car sold.

The difficult process of electrification

This also has a second consequence. If Tavascan sales slow, the average emissions of the cars produced by the company would rise, and they would therefore be exposed to large fines from the European Union. Griffiths repeatedly warned that This put the Cupra brand and even the future of the company at risk., and quantified the labor cost that could be reached: the elimination of 1,500 jobs.

The company faces a major challenge (the Martorell plant is being adapted to produce, for the first time, electric cars: the Cupra Raval and the Volkswagen ID.2), and perhaps that is why the unions have not weighed in on Griffiths' departure. On the contrary, they asked parent company Volkswagen to urgently resolve the succession. The vice president of production and logistics, Markus Haupt, now serves as CEO. The chairman of the Seat works council, Matías Carnero, a member of the Volkswagen supervisory committee, acknowledged Griffiths' contribution: "He has made the electrification of Seat and the achievement of record sales possible." However, he made it clear that Griffiths' successor, who must be approved by the supervisory committee, will be asked to "guarantee the investments" planned and ensure that there are "no setbacks" in electrification. For its part, the CCOO (Spanish Workers' Commissions) is asking Volkswagen to "make the appointment of Markus Haupt as president of Seat SA definitive as soon as possible."