FRANKFURT (Reuters) -Shares in Porsche AG, the luxury sports car maker majority-owned by Volkswagen, will drop out of Germany’s benchmark blue-chip index on September 22, stock exchange operator Deutsche Boerse said on Wednesday.
In a statement on its regular DAX index reshuffle, Deutsche Boerse’s ISS STOXX unit said Porsche AG, which was a member of the DAX following its listing in 2022, would be replaced by Scout24, which operates Germany’s largest real estate search platform.
Porsche AG will become a member of the midcap index MDAX as a result of the DAX exit.
In an interview with newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, CEO Oliver Blume, who also heads parent Volkswagen, said Porsche’s goal was to return to the DAX as soon as possible, citing the low free float as a factor in the relegation.
U.S. import tariffs and weakening demand in China have led Porsche AG’s shares to drop by more than a third over the last 12 months, making it the second-worst decliner among Germany’s large-caps behind drugmaker Merck KGaA.
Porsche said it would take countermeasures such as price adjustments after it announced its earnings for the first half of the year on July 30.
Blume told the newspaper he hoped an overhaul of the business would help the stock’s future performance.
“With Porsche’s new strategy, we have the clear ambition to return to the DAX as soon as possible,” the CEO said.
Pharmaceutical equipment maker Sartorius will also drop out of Germany’s DAX and be replaced by GEA Group, a food processing technology supplier, Deutsche Boerse said.
(Reporting by Christoph Steitz, Writing by Bernadette Hogg, Rachel More and Barbara Lewis)
