34 Capital management

The goal of capital management is to ensure that the Group can effectively achieve its goals and strategies in the interests of shareholders, employees and other stakeholders. In particular, management focuses on generating the minimum return on invested assets in the Automotive Division that is required by the capital markets, and on increasing the return on equity in the Financial Services Division. In addition, the goals of the Financial Services Division are to meet the banking supervisory authorities’ regulatory capital requirements, to support its external rating by ensuring capital adequacy and to procure equity for the growth planned in the next fiscal years. In the process, it aims overall to achieve the highest possible growth in the value of the Group and its divisions for the benefit of all the Company’s stakeholder groups.

The Volkswagen Group’s financial target system focuses systematically on continuously and sustainably increasing the value of the Company. In order to maximize the use of resources in the Automotive Division and to measure the success of this, we have been using value contribution, a control variable linked to the cost of capital, for a number of years.

The concept of value contribution not only allows overall performance to be measured in the Automotive Division, but also in the individual business units, projects and products. In addition, business units and product-specific investment projects can be managed operationally and strategically using the value contribution.

Equity and financial liabilities are compared in the following table: