Volvo Cars has appointed Klaus Zellmer, the CEO of Škoda Auto, as its next President and Chief Executive Officer, ending a search that began when the board brought back Håkan Samuelsson on a two-year contract in April 2025.
Zellmer will take up the post “no later than 1 October 2027,” the company said in a regulatory disclosure on Sunday, three days after Samuelsson told Swedish news agency TT that his contract would not be extended beyond its expiry in April.
Samuelsson “will, together with the Board, ensure a seamless transition,” according to Volvo.
The release does not say who runs the company if Zellmer arrives after Samuelsson’s contract ends, and neither does any of the coverage so far.
The start date of the new CEO is not settled. “No later than 1 October 2027” is a ceiling, not a plan, and Škoda has not said when it will release him or who follows him in Mladá Boleslav.
Who He Is
Zellmer has run Škoda since July 2022 as Chairman of the Board of Management and CEO.
Before that he sat on the board of Volkswagen Passenger Cars responsible for Marketing, Sales and After Sales from September 2020 to June 2022, and spent more than 20 years at Porsche.
His Porsche career ran from sales and marketing at the Leipzig factory from 2002 to 2006, through Marketing Director and then Managing Director and CEO of Porsche Deutschland from 2007 to 2015, to President and CEO of Porsche Cars North America in Atlanta from 2015 to 2020.
“Few automotive brands have built such a strong and lasting reputation for safety, consistently applying this core value across the mobility sector,” Zellmer said in the release. “After almost 100 years, Volvo Cars’ ability to reinvent itself time and again is both a remarkable achievement and an ongoing challenge.”
Eric Li, Chairman of Volvo Cars, said Zellmer’s “experience from both the high-end premium segment and high-volume brands, is an excellent fit,” and that the board expects him to “strengthen its position as a leading premium car company.”
The Record He Brings
Volvo’s release says Škoda “has become one of Europe’s best-selling car brands and delivered record results in 2025, followed by further growth and record deliveries of electric vehicles in the first half of 2026.”
In 2025 the Czech brand delivered 1,043,900 vehicles, up 12.7% and above one million for the first time in six years, on revenue of €30.1 billion and operating profit of €2.5 billion, a return on sales of 8.3%.
It ranked third among brands in Europe.
In the first half of 2026 it delivered 555,700 vehicles, up 9.1%, and moved to second place in Europe behind only Volkswagen.
Battery-electric deliveries rose 48.3% to a record 108,200, led by the Elroq and Enyaq, with the Epiq and the seven-seat Peaq flagship added this year. Revenue was €16.0 billion and operating profit €1.4 billion, a return on sales of 8.5%.
That last number is the point of the hire. Volvo’s board has set a target of an EBIT margin above 8% as the centrepiece of the 13-model plan it unveiled on Thursday. Volvo’s adjusted margin was 3.5% in 2025 and 1.1% in the second quarter. Zellmer has been running a brand at 8.5%.
The two businesses differ in ways the margin comparison hides. Škoda sells at around a third of Volvo’s average transaction price, builds most of its volume in one country, and sits inside a group whose platforms, batteries and software it does not have to fund alone.
The Job He Inherits
Samuelsson returned in April 2025 after the board removed Jim Rowan three years into the job, on a two-year term explicitly framed as stabilisation while a long-term successor was found.
His second tenure has been a cost and cash exercise. An SEK 18 billion programme announced in April 2025 cut about 3,000 white-collar positions, and Volvo delivered its SEK 5 billion 2026 savings target six months early on top of SEK 8 billion in 2025.
The same period carried an SEK 11.4 billion impairment on the EX90 and ES90 platform, a 7% fall in 2025 sales to 710,042 cars, and a decision to prioritise price over volume during the worst sales month in years.
The strategy Zellmer inherits was set out on Thursday: seven models for Western markets on Volvo’s SPA2 and SPA3 platforms and six for China developed with Geely Auto, five plants dedicated to the Volvo brand and two shared with partners, no closures, and a plan to roughly double the company’s share of the electric and plug-in hybrid market from about 1.7%.
The EX60 reached customers in July, Volvo will distribute Lynk & Co in Europe from January 2027, and Geely’s chairman has said the group will build cars at Volvo’s European plants from 2028.
The Man He Replaces
Samuelsson, is the longest-serving chief executive in Volvo’s recent history across his two tenures.
A mechanical engineer from the Royal Institute of Technology, he spent 23 years at Scania before running MAN from 2005 until his resignation in November 2009 amid a bribery investigation at the German truckmaker, which he settled in 2013 with a €500,000 payment to charity while maintaining his innocence.
He joined Volvo’s board in 2010, the year Geely bought the company from Ford, and became chief executive in October 2012 after Stefan Jacoby suffered a stroke.
Over the following decade he took Volvo from about 422,000 sales a year to more than 700,000, replaced Ford-derived platforms with SPA and CMA, opened factories in Chengdu and South Carolina, spun out Polestar, and listed the company on Nasdaq Stockholm in October 2021 at SEK 53 a share.
Volvo’s shares have never regained their listing price under either him or Rowan.
