Volvo Cars, the premium carmaker, has appointed Martina Buchhauser as Senior Vice President Procurement. Ms. Buchhauser joins the Volvo Cars executive management team from BMW, where she has been Senior Vice President of Purchasing and Supplier Network for Interior since 2012.
Ms Buchhauser has a wealth of experience from the automotive industry as well as a proven trackrecord in global sourcing, supplier management and close collaboration with engineering and manufacturing organisations.
Before her career within BMW, where she was in charge of quality and supply for all interior component manufacturing plants around the globe, she worked in various senior purchasing positions at MAN and General Motors since the mid-1980s. She holds a masters degree in management from Stanford University in California.
“I am very pleased to welcome Martina to the company,” said Håkan Samuelsson, president and chief executive at Volvo Cars. “She joins us at a crucial moment as we continue to renew our entire model portfolio, expand our manufacturing footprint and develop our global sourcing and supplier base. Martina’s strong track record and recognized leadership capabilities will be a major asset in this second phase of our transformation.”
“It is very exciting to join Volvo Cars and become a part of the successful journey the company is going through,” said Martina Buchhauser. “This is a company with a strong heritage and appealing core values: a commitment to quality, industry-leading safety, a better environment and care for people. On top of that Volvo Cars is a modern and agile company with exciting technologies and products. The passion that I have encountered so far within Volvo Cars only adds to my excitement.”
In the coming years Volvo Cars will continue to replace its entire model range. Last month at the Geneva Motor Show it launched a completely new version of the successful XC60 mid-size SUV based on the SPA architecture. Later this year Volvo Cars will introduce the XC40 small SUV, the first in an all-new range of 40 series cars based on the CMA architecture that underpin its global small car strategy.
Volvo Cars is also in the middle of an unprecedented expansion of its global manufacturing footprint, developing from a Europe-only manufacturing operation in Sweden and Belgium to a network with six manufacturing plants on three continents.
Construction work on a new USD500m manufacturing plant in South Carolina, its first in the United States, is ongoing. The plant will build new cars based on its modular Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) and will initially employ up to 2,000 people. The new plant in South Carolina underlines Volvo’s long term and strong commitment to the United States and will start operations in 2018.
Last year, Volvo Cars also unveiled a new manufacturing strategy for China in which production capacity will be increased and China will be developed in a global manufacturing export hub. Its top-of-the-range S90 cars will be built in Daqing in northern China, while existing and future 60-series cars will be built in Chengdu. Cars in its planned new 40 series, based on its Compact Modular Architecture (CMA), will be made at a plant under construction in Luqiao, 350km south of Shanghai.
