Wolfsburg/ Stutt­gart — VW acqui­res 49 percent of German digi­tal specia­list Dico­nium. The Volks­wa­gen Group acqui­res a 49 percent stake in the German digi­tal specia­list dico­nium. With this invest­ment, the Volks­wa­gen Group secu­res further know-how and streng­thens its digi­tal busi­ness capa­bi­li­ties. Toge­ther, the two compa­nies will further deve­lop busi­ness models and Volkswagen’s range of digi­tal value-added services. dico­nium will thus become an important tech­no­logy part­ner for buil­ding new digi­tal services that will run in the Volks­wa­gen Auto­mo­tive Cloud. The comple­tion of the acqui­si­tion is still subject to appr­oval by the anti­trust authorities.

Accor­ding to VW, the aim is to be able to quickly offer car buyers digi­tal services such as wire­less updates or auto­ma­tic payment in fully networked vehic­les in the future. Toge­ther, the compa­nies also want to launch a sales plat­form through which VW custo­mers can buy and manage services and func­tions for connec­ted cars online. To do this, VW needs the exper­tise of its new part­ner, said Chris­toph Hartung, head of mobi­lity services at the Volks­wa­gen brand. — Dico­nium employs around 800 people in Germany, Portu­gal, the USA and India.

VW allo­ca­tes 44 billion euros for digitization
Among other things, VW is aiming to offer so-called over-the-air updates (wire­less updates via a radio inter­face) with the market launch of the elec­tric ID model family from 2020. A plan­ned elec­tro­nic sales plat­form is compa­ra­ble to a shop­ping mall with various stores.