Carsten Intra is to be Chairman of the Board of Management at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles in Hannover with effect from 1 September 2020. Thomas Sedran will in future head up management of commercial vehicle and engineering assets within the Volkswagen Group and in this role will report directly to Board of Management member responsible for HR, Gunnar Kilian, who will take over responsibility for the Truck & Bus division on the level of the Group Board of Management. It is intended that in this role Sedran will in particular coordinate the strategic direction of the Volkswagen Group’s shareholdings on behalf of the Group Board of Management.
Latterly, in addition to the operational management of the Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles brand, Thomas Sedran was above all involved in a key way with negotiating and driving forward the strategic alliance with Ford. “The ongoing development of the commercial vehicles business in line with the Global-Champion-Strategy and the strategic further development of the engineering operation are two of the Volkswagen Group’s key future areas of work,” said Chairman of the Volkswagen AG Board of Management Dr Herbert Diess.
Since July 2017 he has been Human Resources and Industrial Relations Director at MAN SE and MAN Truck & Bus SE. He is also a member of the management board of TRATON SE, responsible for the areas of personnel and IT. With a doctorate in mechanical engineering, he brings with him for his CEO role at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles broad experience from the commercial vehicles segment. He began at what was then MAN Commercial Vehicles AG in 2001 as a production engineer and by 2004 had already been entrusted with management of the central planning operation for the network of plants. From 2006 onwards Intra headed up the HGV unit. Following further management positions in Turkey and Brazil, Intra took over the Production & Logistics brief on the management board of MAN Truck & Bus AG in 2004. From November 2015 he was also responsible for the Research & Development brief.
Thomas Sedran has a doctorate in economics and worked from 1988 to 2012 as a corporate advisor. In 2012, Sedran was appointed to the Adam Opel AG management board and as interim CEO. In 2015, Volkswagen made him Head of Group Strategy. On 1 September 2018 he became Chairman of the Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles Brand Management Board. Together with the Board of Management he set up the future strategy GRIP 2025+, starting the biggest transformation of all time of the brand. Part of this is the development towards electro-mobility along with the fully electric ID. BUZZ, that will be produced at the Hannover plant as of 2022. The cooperation with Ford, signed in June 2020, will ensure production load at VWCV production sites. Under the leadership of Dr Sedran the brand got responsibility on Group level for the development of autonomous driving vehicles. Investments in Argo AI plays an important role in this. A further and key aspect of the transformation is an agreement on the future development of the site in Hannover with the Works Council that excludes, among other things, layoffs until 2029.