The historic Seat brand is on the verge of disappearance, and it is getting closer and closer that the Volkswagen group will stop investing in this brand and concentrate all its efforts on the Cupra brand models. According to preparatory documents for the German giant's supervisory board meeting, which will be held this Friday, advanced by the German magazine Wirtschafts Woche, the Seat brand will disappear from 2029. In a statement, Seat explains that a decision has not yet been made in this regard, but admits that the Volkswagen group "is working on a business transformation plan for the entire Group to strengthen its competitiveness and efficiency."
At the meeting of the supervisory group, the future course of the German giant will be decided amid the major planned adjustments, and the company is expected to propose a restructuring plan with thousands of layoffs and factory closures, to face Chinese competition and profitability problems. In this sense, the end of the investment in the Seat brand and its possible future disappearance would be one of the points of the package of measures that will be discussed at the meeting.
The last meeting of the supervision group was held in July. Then, the first information about the restructuring plan of the Volkswagen group indicated that personnel cuts in the German giant could reach 100,000 workers, in addition to the closure of four factories in Germany. This figure represents 50,000 more than initially planned until 2030, with the majority of layoffs concentrated in Germany. Volkswagen (VW) CEO Oliver Blume referred to this figure in July in an interview with Der Spiegel. At this new meeting of Volkswagen's supervisory group, a package of measures will be presented that will include a cut in employment, restructuring of the group's factories, including the closure of some of them, and restructuring of the model strategy, as well as other measures for the transformation of the group.
Seat's statement emphasizes that the transformation being prepared is global. "The entire industry, including the Volkswagen Group and, of course, SEAT S.A., is immersed in a profound transformation, based on our commitment to electrification. The global context has changed significantly, severely impacting the automotive sector, especially in the last year," the note explains. "For this reason, the Volkswagen Group is working on a business transformation plan for the entire Group to strengthen its competitiveness and efficiency. The objective is to make the entire Volkswagen Group and its respective companies more efficient and agile, as well as to systematically take advantage of potential technological synergies. This strategy is being debated in different meetings of the Supervisory Board," he says, and ends by alluding to the information that assumes the disappearance of the Seat brand: "No decision has been made in this regard."
The CEO of Seat and Cupra, Markus Haupt, has defended on several occasions recently that the group's restructuring plan does not have to affect the Martorell plant, since it has already carried out measures to reduce its structural costs by 20%, a plan that ends this year. But in Martorell, concern is growing with the possibility that Volkswagen's transformation plan will end up affecting the Spanish manufacturer. Paradoxically, the plant is in a sweet moment: after an investment of 3,000 million euros to build a platform that is capable of producing electric cars, the first electric models of Volkswagen's urban range, the Cupra Raval and the ID Polo, have been manufactured in Martorell since July.
But, at the same time, the Spanish manufacturer is struggling to regain profitability: in 2025, the operating profit was only one million euros, compared to the 633 million recorded in 2024, 99% less, mainly due to the European Union tariffs that affected the Cupra Tavascan throughout the year. This drop in profitability occurred despite growing 3% in cars sold (657,413 units in 2025) and 5.1% in turnover (15.3 billion euros in 2025). This 2026, in the first quarter the company managed to multiply its operating profit by almost nine, and trusts in its new Cupra Raval model to consolidate this return to profitability.
Historical brand
In this context, the future of the historic Seat brand, which is 76 years old, will be decided. Last year, on the occasion of its 75th anniversary, the company set up an exhibition of the brand's emblematic models during the Barcelona Automobile Show, and defended that Seat still had a future ahead of it. But the truth is that the banner has been on the wire for some time now. In 2018, from within the Seat offices in Martorell, a new brand, Cupra, was launched to appeal to a younger and more casual audience, and to focus the electric car strategy on this new brand. The strategy was clearly to extinguish the historic brand, so that his sister would grow older and end up being left alone. In 2023, the CEO of Volkswagen expressed it this way: "We have to wait and see, be patient because we still have to make decisions in this regard. It will not take five years, it will happen much sooner, but we need a little more time to define everything."
It seemed that Seat's fate as a brand was doomed, but the postponement of Brussels' sanctions against polluting emissions gave the brand one last shot of oxygen: Seat could continue producing combustion cars under its umbrella, still necessary, and Cupra would become big with electric cars, which have taken longer than expected to take off. But now the proportion of Seat and Cupra cars is already going in favor of the new brand: in 2025 Cupra broke its own record with 328,800 units sold, 32.5% more, while Seat, which had the renewed versions of the Ibiza and Arona models, delivered 257,400 cars, 17% less.
Seat S.A., the company that manages the two brands, is the largest company in Catalonia: it has more than 15,000 direct workers, but also around the company pivots an important auxiliary automotive industry that is of capital importance for the Catalan economy. The end of investment in the historic brand from 2029 - until then a hybrid version of the Seat León and a renewal of the León range are planned - does not mean that this brand will disappear completely, but it does mean that it will lose weight. Whether Cupra alone will be able to last another 75 years, only time will tell.
