“In the future, our customers will expect the kind of software updates for their car that they’re familiar with today from their smartphone,” says Michael Steiner, Member of the Executive Board – Research and Development at Porsche AG. “The networking of the vehicle with its environment, its home base and other vehicles will become standard. The ability to bring new functions and services to the market quickly will be the dominant competitive factor in the future. We need an up-to-date software architectures and suitable solutions for this. That’s what makes Cetitec the right partner for us,” says Steiner.
Cetitec was spun off from Karlsruhe-based K2L GmbH in 2012 and currently has around 100 employees. The company specialises in software development for platform solutions in the automotive sector. Porsche and Cetitec already enjoy a long-standing partnership. Porsche is now acquiring a strategic stake in Cetitec in order to secure the future prospects of the digital vehicle infrastructure. By doing so, the sports car manufacturer is further expanding its expertise in the software environment. Cetitec will remain in the market with its expertise and products as an independent supplier to the automotive industry.
“Porsche acquiring a stake in our company gives us the opportunity to better understand the requirements of car manufacturers and in this way further expand the development of innovative software products. This enables us to expand our product range and offer additional software solutions designed specifically for the automotive sector,” says Thomas Keicher, Managing Partner at Cetitec. “The prospect of establishing our products in new vehicle concepts together with Porsche opens up enormous growth potential for us and at the same time safeguards jobs at Cetitec,” says Keicher.
A central success factor at Porsche in being able to meet current and future customer requirements in the automotive sector is a new end-to-end electronics architecture as part of the Volkswagen Group’s “E³” electronics initiative. Associated with this is a modern and powerful software architecture which makes it possible to respond to market requirements quickly and develop functions and services efficiently. In this way, Porsche is further increasing its vertical integration in the area of software development. The Stuttgart sports car manufacturer is currently developing the first vehicle based on the new electronics architecture, which is expected to come into use in 2022.
The acquisition of the stake in Cetitec is still subject to the approval of the German Federal Cartel Office.
