Volkswagen India appoints Ashish Gupta as brand director
Volkswagen India, has announced that he current head, Steffen Knapp will step down from his role November 1 onwards. He is set to be replaced by Ashish Gupta who up until now served as the head of sales at Volkswagen Passenger Cars India.
Steffen Knapp has held this position since August 2017. In this time, he has repositioned the Volkswagen brand in India, helped the Skoda-VW combine garner 3 per cent market share and improved the sales & after-sales service operations. He also played a part in implementing Volkswagen's India 2.0 plan, the first cars from which we will see next year.Â
Ashish Gupta has been with Volkswagen for the last eight years, before which he held an engineering position at Larus Infosystems. He is a BTech graduate from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology and an MBA from Jaypee Business School.
Like Skoda, Volkswagen has had some prominent launches in the last year, most notably the new 1.0 TSI-powered versions of the Polo and Vento, followed by the automatic versions of these cars equipped with a new torque converter gearbox. Prior to this, the German carmaker also launched the petrol-powered Volkswagen Tiguan Allspace. Upcoming launches from VW should be the updated Passat and the heavily-localized Volkswagen Taigun SUV, already showcased at the 2020 Auto Expo.