Volvo Cars has appointed Klaus Zellmer, chairman of the board of management at Skoda Auto, as president and chief executive, taking over from Hakan Samuelsson no later than 1 October 2027. Skoda posted an 8.5% operating margin in the first half of 2026, against Volvo’s 3.5% for last year and an 8% target with no date attached.

That is more than a year away.

Zellmer has run Skoda Auto since 2022. Before that he sat on the Volkswagen Passenger Cars board with marketing, sales and after sales, and spent more than 20 years at Porsche, including running its German and North American businesses. Under him Skoda posted record results in 2025 and record electric deliveries in the first half of this year.

Volvo is hiring a margin.

Skoda made an operating profit of EUR 1.4B in the first half of this year on an 8.5% margin, delivered 555,700 cars and finished as Europe’s second best-selling brand. Its battery electric deliveries rose 48% to 108,200, and plug-in hybrids rose 12% to 24,100.

Volvo’s margin last year was 3.5%.

Its strategy update this month set a target of 8%, with 13 new models by 2030, seven for Western markets and six for China. The Western cars use the SPA2 and SPA3 platforms, and the Chinese ones are co-developed with Geely. It has not said when it expects to get there.

It set an 8 to 10% target in 2021 and withdrew guidance last year.

The plan for closing the gap is not Skoda’s. Volvo intends to triple parts commonality with Geely from 10% to 30%, which it expects to cut material costs by around 5% by 2030. It also wants to double its combined electric and hybrid market share.

That is a Chinese synergy, not a German one.

Geely’s chairman said in April that the group would stop building factories anywhere in the world and use Volvo’s instead, naming plants in Sweden, Belgium, China, Malaysia, India and the United States.

The incoming chief executive arrives into that.

Samuelsson ran Volvo from 2012 to 2022, Jim Rowan followed, and Samuelsson returned in April 2025 on a brief the company always described as temporary. Zellmer now gets a year to hand over Skoda. Chinese brands meanwhile passed 15% of Europe’s electric sales in April, and Volvo’s owner is one of them.