TU-TESL

• 22

According to Reuters, a few days ago, the supplier, prevent group, sued auto group, saying it used anti competitive strategies to prevent it from acquiring other small suppliers. "VW has signed a written agreement with these small suppliers to reject the purchase of the prevent group, which is a typical anti competitive behavior." "VW has been using its strong market influence to squeeze suppliers all the time, and some small suppliers will face the risk of bankruptcy if they resist a little," said the group It is reported that the event group has made more than $750 million (5.28 billion yuan) of compensation claims to the public. In response to the above accusations, a spokesman for Volkswagen Group said: "this is a totally groundless lawsuit, and we will take up the legal weapons to fight against the event group fiercely." In fact, the grudge between Volkswagen Group and prevent group has a long history. In 2016, VW signed an order worth 500 million euros (3.873 billion yuan) with car trim, a company of the event group. However, after the "emission gate" scandal broke out, VW cancelled the order unilaterally. At this time, car trim had invested 58 million euros (450 million yuan) in the order. After the claim for compensation failed, car trim joined forces with ES automobiguss, another company under the prevent group, to stop parts and components of Volkswagen and exhaust emission system. In retaliation for the two suppliers, Volkswagen's six factories were shut down for nearly a week, with losses of up to 100 million euros (about 775 million yuan). After more than 20 hours of hard negotiations, Volkswagen finally "softened" and paid 13 million euros (about 100 million yuan) in compensation. However, two years after the settlement of the incident, in 2018, Volkswagen Group suddenly announced that it would terminate all cooperation with the precaution group and refuse to accept any part supply it had already produced, which led to the great loss of the precaution group, forced to lay off 90 workers and reduce the working hours of 700 workers.