Inside Porsche’s revival bid: Pricier cars, tougher bonuses and less remote work

Porsche’s new CEO is betting on luxury pricing and a tougher culture to revive the battered automaker.

A Porsche 911 at the end of the assembly line in Stuttgart, Germany.

Porsche’s new chief executive Michael Leiters had an unfamiliar message for staff: Bonuses should reflect performance.

At employee meetings this summer, Leiters said the sports-car company’s annual payouts—for years among the most generous and reliable in the German car industry—weren’t a given, and they would depend on a recovery in the company’s profit for which everyone was individually responsible, according to attendees. One way to achieve this, he said: Staff needed to be in the office more.

Leiters compared working

Michael Leiters, CEO of Porsche.

Also part of the plan: even more expensive sports cars. At an event in New York on Thursday, Leiters and his new chief designer, Tobias Sühlmann, launched an early prototype of the kind of low-slung, elongated model they want to build for an even more rarefied market than the company’s iconic 911 sports car.

Leiters, who joined Porsche in January after more than a decade at supercar brands McLaren and Ferrari, is betting that new vehicles at the top end of Porsche’s product range will in time help restore the company’s bottom line.

Last year the company issued a string of profit warnings and ended up reporting less than half a billion dollars in net income, down from $5.6 billion in 2023. This year, German staff didn’t receive a customary annual bonus, which exceeded $10,000 in 2024.

In addition to supercars, a three-row SUV is in the works that would be more expensive than the company’s current Cayenne model. Leiters also wants to sell more one-off or limited-edition versions of existing Porsche models, prices for which can stretch to $15 million.

The overall plan involves finding ways to increase the average price of the 10,000 most expensive Porsches sold each year to the equivalent of around $370,000, the company said, from $300,000 today.

The strategy is borrowed from Leiters’s former employer Ferrari. A business model built around milking the very richest customers has turned the Italian brand into Europe’s most profitable and valuable automaker.

One of the new CEO’s first moves was to tap Sühlmann from McLaren and ask him for ideas for what a Porsche supercar could look like. Sühlmann, who started his career at Volkswagen in Germany before moving to the U.K., has spent much of the year commuting weekly from London to Porsche’s base near Stuttgart to create the prototype shown on Thursday.

But hires such as Sühlmann, who succeeded veteran designer Michael Mauer in what the company called a “generational change,” have been the exception in Leiters’s tenure, which has been marked by deep cuts.

A Porsche at a 1967 motor show in Frankfurt.

In July, the CEO came to a deal with the company’s union representatives that more than doubled job losses at the company to around 9,000 by 2035, or around a fifth of the total workforce. The agreement also signaled a cultural shift, cutting the number of days a month Porsche staff can work from home to eight from 12 and linking the traditional annual bonus more closely to financial performance.

Last week Leiters said future bonuses would be paid partly in stock, and the company revamped the bonus structure for top managers to put more weight on individual contributions.

“We wanted to show that nobody can hide behind the whole organization,” he explained.

Although he delivered the plan in English, he gave it a German name: Sportwagenschmiede ‘35, which translates loosely as “sports-car workshop ‘35.” Leiters said no English word captured the “entrepreneurial mindset, the willingness to put in hard work,” that he wanted to convey with “Schmiede,” which shares linguistic roots with the English “smithy.”

In another signal of a new seriousness, Leiters and his team wore ties to present the plan.

Early on in his tenure, the CEO had half-jokingly called out a top manager for wearing hiking boots to a presentation, according to someone familiar with the incident. The story soon circulated around Porsche’s headquarters, and through word-of-mouth staffers came to believe the new boss had implemented a formal dress code. Leiters later clarified at a company meeting that there were no new rules, but that staff should dress appropriately for the occasion, particularly when representing the brand at public events.

Under Leiters’s predecessor Oliver Blume, who is rarely seen in a tie, Porsche had enjoyed years of almost continual growth. Over the decade through 2023, sales roughly doubled to more than 320,000 vehicles, thanks to new models such as the Macan SUV and China’s then-insatiable appetite for German luxury cars.

Porsche generated so much profit for its owner, Volkswagen, that the parent company in 2022 appointed Blume to be its own CEO—on top of his job at Porsche.

A Porsche dealership in Shanghai, China, in 2024.

But then the China boom turned to bust, leaving Porsche with too many staff led by a boss who had a bigger job at Volkswagen’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, more than 300 miles to the north of Stuttgart.

The problem was compounded by massive bets made by the Blume-era Porsche on EVs, particularly a decision to make the new Macan electric only. When EV growth stalled, billions of dollars had to be written off. Porsche revived plans for an entry-level SUV with a gas engine, but it won’t arrive until 2028.

Leiters declared Porsche would never make an electric 911 but said he was won over by an electric 718 Boxster sports car.

He also plans to shrink Porsche so that it can break even if sales fall as low as 200,000. Having spent almost 15 years at the company before leaving for Ferrari in 2014, he was surprised by how much bigger the organization had become in his absence, according to people close to him.

The strategy is designed to help lift Porsche’s operating margin—a closely watched measure of profitability for automakers—to between 10% and 15% by 2030, with a longer-term target of 15%. Porsche routinely reported margins above 15% before the recent collapse, but the new targets are still ambitious.

An employee performs a quality check on a Porsche 911 at the end of the assembly line in Stuttgart.

Analysts have broadly welcomed the plan but say it will take time to play out. The three-row SUV isn’t expected before 2029, and the supercar family launched on Thursday will take even longer.

“Product-planning mistakes are not fixed easily or quickly,” said Oxcap analyst Stuart Pearson.

Write to Stephen Wilmot at stephen.wilmot@wsj.com