Continuing our series of interviews with the some of the automotive industry’s most influential leaders, Al Clarke, Chairman of the Ennis & Co Advisory Group, talks to Lothar Schupet about his transition from the traditional world of BMW to running the Chinese challenger brand, Zeekr.
Al Clarke: The first part of your career was a very traditional and solid progression in BMW through sales and marketing in Germany, with international assignments leading to a global General Manager role for the BMW M division. Tell me about that part of your career and whether you think it would still be possible for a graduate today to do what you did.
Lothar Schupet: I joined BMW Group26 years ago on a trainee programme that combined university studies in industrial engineering with on-the-job assignments. It was a five-year programme that was very broad in scope and gave me first-hand experience of the machine room of the company, developing engines and working in areas such as aerodynamics.
After completing my training, I moved into sales and marketing, setting me on the career path to where I am now. The move exposed me to my first leadership positions, initially being responsible for marketing and PR for a small region of Germany before taking over a bigger region in the north of the country, with responsibility for 40 MINI dealers. I then moved on to become Regional Area Manager for several European countries. From there, I was given ownership of individual markets, beginning with Croatia, where I led a project to establish an NSC. I then took over as CEO of BMW Group Slovenia, with responsibility for BMW, MINI and Motorrad.
This was my last role before I moved to headquarters in Munich to become General Manager for Global Sales and Marketing for BMW M. As a subsidiary of BMW AG manufacturing high-performance luxury cars, BMW M has always been known as the ‘speed boat’ of the company and it operates in a very agile environment. It grew from a niche business to produce an annual volume of 250,000 vehicles and deliver 20% of the profit from the automotive sector for the entire group.
After 23 years at BMW, progressing from the shopfloor to a global role, a big opportunity came up at the beginning of 2023 to join a new and agile electric mobility brand and participate in the huge change taking place in the industry. Having launched the first electric car in Slovenia and been involved in moving customer passion from combustion engines towards electric cars, I saw the chance to join Zeekr Europe as Chief Commercial Officer as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, particularly with the power of Geely Group behind it.
Looking back at my time at BMW, I would certainly do it all again. Yes, there were challenges along the way such as the financial crisis, but it was a great learning curve to be part of building such a prestigious brand consistently over a quarter of a century. But times have changed so much and so quickly, and the traditional way of thinking is slowing down business and making things very difficult. Having experienced working in a highly entrepreneurial, driven, innovative and agile culture at Zeekr, I don’t think I could now move back into a rigid, traditional environment.
AC: It was intriguing to hear you say you would do your BMW career all over again because of the grounding it gave you. But is that changing today? Do you think that with the pace of change taking place in the industry, a different kind of career path is needed to get people to the level that you reached at BMW?
LS: I think senior leaders in a series OEM business need a broader skill set than they did before because of the complexity of all the new technology coming in and the increased globalisation of products and technology suppliers. On the distribution side, OEMs operated a traditional model for decades. You had the dealers, you had some importers, and that was it. Now, with all the new players and the growth of the D2C model, the world has changed completely.
When I employ people in senior positions, they need to bring experience from companies that have applied different models and to have lived in an agile environment. A vertical career path is still needed, but it also needs to be horizontal in certain leadership positions to understand the complexity that has arisen in recent years.
AC: During your career, you’ve had regional and global responsibility as well as NSC responsibility. As the industry moves towards China, do you think having international experience in China is becoming more important for leaders?
LS: In my experience, it is crucial. The transformation being driven by the OEMs in China is obvious, while luxury and premium OEMs in Europe and other continents have become increasingly irrelevant in terms of the EV market.
Other segments are also dying. The traditional OEMs have tried to fight against the rise of the Chinese, believing that their manufacturing capability and quality will help them close the gaps and eventually overtake them. Now they have learned that this is simply not possible. BMW are one of the last OEMs who are not in a China OEM partnership, whereas others are moving forward strongly with joint ventures.
LS: You only have to compare factories. We recently showed our factory to the media during the Shanghai Motor Show and they could barely believe what they were seeing in terms of the 5G technology and the degree of automation. The leaders of the future need to experience that for themselves both from the technology and the culture perspective to be able to collaborate with China efficiently and professionally.
During my BMW M role, I led on the China strategy and commissioned a huge market study to understand the Chinese customers and get our portfolio right. Since joining a Chinese company, I’ve also spent many weeks in the country. It’s clear that the culture is very different and I’ve seen a lot of colleagues struggle to bridge that cultural gap. You need to have openness and an agile mindset to bridge the gaps culturally in terms of target-setting, collaboration, methods, expectations and decision-making.
AC: Going back to 2022 when you were first having discussions about moving from the security of BMW to a startup brand owned by Geely, what were your main considerations?
LS: With the exception of my last position at BMW M, I’ve never been in the same role for longer than 2-4 years. I was always keen to move on and take on a new challenge and I think I had 11 different jobs in total at BMW. I was motivated by creating and achieving things and moving forward, which you could call an entrepreneurial mindset.
When you mature within the group and reach a senior leadership position, your biggest assets are your network and your reputation. But I was also aware that 80-90% of my peers were at the same stage in their careers, having stayed with BMW for 20 or 30 years. There weren’t many new people coming into the business with different ideas and views, and I really wanted to experience something new and to work with people who had different perspectives.
At the same time, I was looking at what was happening in the wider industry in terms of Tesla and the wave of new EV entrants. Things were moving very fast in areas such as digitalisation but implementing them in my own area of the business was always held back by slow processes. Ultimately, my mind was made up when I drove the Zeekr products for the first time and was amazed how much the brand had achieved in such a short space of time.
AC: What are your reflections on the differences, or indeed similarities, between organisations like BMW and Zeekr?
LS: They have the obvious similarities of being corporate organisations with all the proper corporate functions. At the end of the day, they are both producing and selling cars and the business foundations – how they are enabled, supported, developed and established – are essentially the same. But, as I’ve already mentioned, the culture, or mindset, is very different.
People we’ve hired who have experienced both worlds all say the same thing. The old, traditional businesses are struggling with legacy IT systems, legacy decision systems and legacy ways of working. Meanwhile, there are the new companies that are having to fight and reinvent themselves continually because they need to catch up with the established OEMs, especially in Europe. To do this, you need to be agile and you need to benchmark. You need to look at what others are doing better and how you can overcome that and make quick changes to your business model, your IT or your approach to the market. This is the essential difference between the old and new.
The other key difference is the people. Our company expects much more of them, but they are loving being part of it. Unlike in my old company, it’s not a 9-to-5 job. There’s a completely different mentality that is driven by an entrepreneurial mindset. We are all about revenue and EBIT, about what we invest and what we need to return. It’s not about administering long-established processes and budgets but creating something new and iterating. Not everyone is cut out for this kind of environment, as we have discovered. Because we needed to recruit quickly to ramp up the business organisation, our selection process tended to favour people with experience of traditional OEMs. You need this grounding of experience, but you also need a diverse range of personalities and characteristics in people and leaders, and the traditional way of thinking should not be too strong.
AC: From a personal and professional point of view, how did you navigate the transition from traditional to new when you made the jump to Zeekr?
LS: I’m driven by being passionate about what I do and I am motivated by the opportunities rather than thinking too much about the challenges. This is the type of mindset you need in a fast-moving, agile environment like Zeekr. When we interview for roles, we see people who are fascinated by the new brand and excited about joining the company, while there are others who mistakenly believe they can do the job well without having to make a big personal commitment to the company. This is also a big difference between Chinese culture and European culture.
As an organisation, we need to find the right balance. We cannot just do it the Chinese way and expect people to work 9-to-9 six or seven days a week. In Europe there are rules against this, and you also need to find the way to get the best out of your people. What is essential, though, is that people are motivated by the vision and ambition and are prepared to go the extra mile to achieve it. I am no different. I have a family, and so I need to find a balance between my personal life and going that extra mile.
Everyone needs to find their own way, but the basic principle is that you align with the culture and you are intrinsically driven to develop the business and make things happen instead of seeking a job that’s not too stressful. Unfortunately, finding people with the right mindset is becoming increasingly difficult, with the new generations having completely different expectations when it comes to work-life balance. This will probably be one of the biggest challenges over the next few years and we will need to find the right incentive systems and motivators in terms of flexibility.
AC: Is this a fundamental difference between the Chinese and the European mindset? And how do you maintain the focus on the goal once you move beyond the initial startup phase without burning your people out? What do you do about developing people as the business grows, or is it about using people for the time they are needed and then moving them on and bringing in new people to move to the next stage?
LS: It cannot be only about mindset. That is the basic principle that I think we need to have but we’re all human being beings and we only have 24 hours in day. There needs to be a degree of balance. In terms of developing people, the main point about startups like us is that we are growing, and with growth you open up a lot of opportunities. The career path for our people is the opportunity to grow as the company grows. We don’t have a check-box system like the traditional OEMs where you must spend five years abroad and serve your time in certain roles before you can progress to the next level. This means that in our company, and in many other startups, you see more younger people in senior leadership positions than you would in a traditional business.
AC: You are six months into your current role as Acting CEO, having previously been COO. What is the difference in terms of the nature of the roles and the expectations on you?
LS: The roles are very different, of course. As COO, I had responsibility for sales, marketing and network development and so I was in the machine room of the business, with a strong operational focus on every single car being sold and delivered while building the markets, systems and processes and partner network. In my new role, I’m still involved in these topics on a weekly basis but I am no longer so operational. That said, my strategic role is also pretty operational because everything is so fast-moving. You set a strategy and, within two months, you’re having to redefine it – especially in the last few months when there have been so many influences such as tariffs and opening up in new markets. My big challenge is now to take the organisation forward from a startup approach and find a mature, sustainable path in Europe.
AC: You have clearly earned the trust of Geely in terms of leading the business in Europe. How hard is it for traditional European or western leaders to get to that point of trust with a Chinese parent company?
LS: It’s very difficult.There are many examples in the industry of failures but I think my time as COO reassured Geely because it showed I had first-hand operational knowledge about what we are building and that I could be trusted to deliver.
To be honest, I underestimated how much relationship-building was needed. I thought I always had big strengths in this area, but building relationships in China is a very different animal and requires the right approach, the right investment and the right respect towards the cultural values. I certainly underestimated how many flights to China I needed to take and the amount of hours of discussion required on WeChat. But the good thing is that once trust is established, the Chinese are so reliant on their relationships that they will help you with whatever you need. Fundamentally, they are interested in business and if you have built a relationship with them that’s moving forward, then they will fight alongside you to make things happen.
AC: I guess working for a Chinese brand is not for everybody, but what would your advice be to a younger leader thinking about their options and debating whether to try something new?
LS: I think young leaders need to be open to uncertainty and to taking risks for the sake of learning and developing their career. In my early career working for a traditional OEM, I had ambitions to grow but it was always about incremental progress from one level of management to the next. I think those times are over. Companies like ours need people who are flexible and agile who are motivated to create something. They also need to be prepared to be hands-on. Even in my current role as Acting CEO, I am much more hands-on with details than I was when I was CEO for a smaller market at BMW. If you have that kind of mindset, then that is the perfect starting point for a young leader looking to join a new brand.
AC: Your career path has been different to that of most people in the industry. Who has inspired you in your career to follow that route?
LS: Reflecting on my old company, I was inspired by one of my senior leaders, Dr Nicolas Peter, who is now Chairman of the Supervisory Board of BMW AG.He was always very inspiring as a leader and was a strong influence on me not in terms of wanting to seek out new opportunities but in being hands-on and wanting to understand every detail. Starting from scratch, he revaluated all the things he was responsible for such as finance, product and sales and had a very broad view of the company.
Another very inspirational person is Li Shufu, the Chairman of Geely. His ambition is for Geely to be one of the world’s top manufacturers, not simply an investment company, and to learn from the various acquisitions about how to do things best. The Volvo acquisition was maybe a trigger for this at the beginning in terms of how to build the best traditional, safe and high-level premium cars. Similarly, the acquisition of Lotus delivered learnings about high-performance and luxury sports cars, while LEVC brought knowledge about functionality. That very grounded ambition of learning from the acquisitions to strive to become the best automaker is an inspirational story. Of course, a business needs money and needs to be sustainable, but the ambition is rooted in automotive passion.
