How did Porsche do in 2009?

Porsche Automobil Holding SE was founded in Stuttgart, Germany in 1931 by Ferdinand Porsche, who also designed the first Volkswagen Beetle. Over time, these two companies have shared automobile manufacturing technologies with Porsche targeting the high-end market and Volkswagen targeting the low-end market. Porsche has gradually purchased larger stakes of Volkswagen and in August 2009, Porsche arranged with Volkswagen to merge by the year 2011.

Porsche and Volkswagen have continued to share automobile components. The Porsche Cayenne and Volkswagen Touareg share the same vehicle platform.

Porsche is well-known for producing luxury, high-performance, sports cars. Porsche has been very successful in motorsport racing, so many owners feel like they are race car drivers. Porsche markets itself as building "intelligent performance." Porsche claims to have the highest profit per unit sold of any automobile company in the world.

Unfortunately, it had a bad fiscal year for 2008/2009; Porsche's financial year runs from August 1st to July 31st of the next year. While Porsche listed revenue of 55,974,000,000 Euro, Porsche lost 3,563,000,000 Euro for fiscal year of 2008/2009. Porsche had 11,910 employees in 2009.

Porsche is listed under the stock ticker symbol, "PAH," on the Frankfurt, Germany Stock Exchange. Porsche stock has declined from 58.00 Euro around January 2, 2009 to 43.00 Euro around December 31, 2009.

The best-selling Porsche car in the United States in 2009 was the mid-size luxury sports utility vehicle (SUV) Cayenne, with sales of 7,735. This might be one of the fastest SUVs around.

The worst-selling Porsche car in the United States for 2009 was the Panamera mid-size luxury car, which was in its first year of production. Due to its low center of gravity, Porsche models have impressive road handling performance characteristics, but offer space challenges to tall customers.

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