Agency Report –
Berlin – Chinese company Wanfeng plans to buy Germany’s insolvent air cab manufacturer Volocopter for €10 million ($11 million), Wanfeng disclosed to investors on Wednesday.
The contract has not yet been signed, and a spokesman for Volocopter said the company is “not commenting on this at present.”
According to Wanfeng’s announcement, the Volocopter business will be handled by a specially founded subsidiary based in Berlin, which will be part of the Wanfeng-owned Austrian aircraft manufacturer Diamond Aircraft.
Volocopter, a start-up which was founded in 2011, has sought to build an all-electric passenger aircraft that can take off and land vertically. But the company has yet to receive an airworthiness certificate from the European Aviation Safety Agency.
In mid-February, Volocopter announced that it had completed 75% of the required audits. At that time, the company announced a partnership with France’s Jet Systems Hélicoptères Services.
The deal reportedly involved the delivery of two Volocity air cabs, although it was only a declaration of intent.
Germany’s Wirtschaftswoche magazine had reported the Chinese company’s interest in the struggling Volocopter firm last week.
At a meeting at the beginning of last week, all of Volocopters employees were informed that they would be laid off with immediate effect.
Dpa has learned that around 450 people were affected by the announcement, although Wirtschaftswoche reported that around 160 of them will continue to be employed.
Volocopter filed for insolvency proceedings on the day after Christmas. The court in the German city of Karlsruhe has appointed attorney Tobias Wahl as the provisional insolvency administrator.
Wahl had planned to develop a restructuring concept by the end of February and implement it with investors.
The court opened insolvency proceedings at the beginning of March.
In the autumn, it became known that Volocopter boss Dirk Hoke planned to leave the company for a job leading the Voith technology group by April 1 at the latest.
Volocopter board chairman Dieter Zetsche, who was once the chairman of German carmaker Mercedes-Benz, had been leading a search for Hoke’s successor but had not made any moves so far given the company’s uncertain future.
Volocopter had benefited from political support, and drew significant media attention in recent years. But the company has also repeatedly struggled with problems and failed in its bids to receive public funding.
In Volocopter’s bankruptcy filing, the company stated that numerous rounds of financing had driven development and operations at the company, and that Volocopter had survived in an extremely difficult financial environment until recently.
“We are ahead of our industry peers in our technological, flight test and certification progress,” Hoke said at the time of the bankruptcy filing. “That makes us an attractive company to invest in while we organize ourselves with internal restructuring.”
Volocopter had declared its ambitions to fly people around during the Olympic Games in Paris, which took place in mid-2024.
However, due to the lack of a permit for commercial passenger operations, Volocopter was limited to conducting demonstration flights, including near the Palace of Versailles.
Volocopter has, however, received permission to train pilots.
Although advertised as sustainable and quiet, the modern electric aircraft have not been without controversy.
An analysis of 11 studies by the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim found that travel times were barely shortened by the use of the air cabs, while costs and CO2 emissions increased compared to electric cars.
“Urban air mobility can be particularly useful for emergency operations and for connecting remote regions,” the institute conclude.
By Marco Krefting, Susanne Kupke-Flohr and Jörn Petring
