Porsche spent three decades building a consulting firm from scratch, spent 2023 buying out the last outside shareholders so it would own all of it, and on August 24 sold the entire thing to an Indian technology conglomerate that most Porsche owners have never heard of.
That’s not even the interesting part.
The interesting part is what Porsche signed in the same announcement: a five-year, 1.25-billion-euro contract to buy back roughly the same kind of digital and AI expertise from the very company that just bought it.
Porsche is framing this as an artificial intelligence story. Look at the actual numbers, and it reads more like a company renting back its own brain because it can no longer afford to own it.
According to Porsche’s own newsroom announcement, Tata Consultancy Services has agreed to acquire 100 percent of MHP, formally MHP Management- und IT-Beratung GmbH, Porsche’s management and IT consultancy headquartered in Ludwigsburg, Germany, pending the usual antitrust clearance. MHP keeps its name, its roughly 4,500 employees, and its client roster, which spans automotive, aerospace, defense, and public-sector work well beyond Porsche. At the same time, TCS and MHP are standing up a dedicated AI Mobility Centre of Excellence for Porsche, backed by a separate five-year strategic partnership.
Do the arithmetic, and the first wait, really moment shows up. TCS is paying roughly 320 million euros for a business that pulled in around 742 million euros in revenue last year, selling for less than half of one year’s sales. Porsche then turns around and commits to spending nearly four times that sale price, spread across five years, just to keep access to comparable digital and AI work from the company that now owns it. That’s not a technology strategy. That’s a balance-sheet decision dressed up as one.
So why now? Porsche’s own first-half 2026 results, published a few weeks before the MHP announcement, spell it out. In 2025, Porsche’s group operating return on sales, historically among the fattest margins in the car business, fell to 1.1 percent, down from 14.1 percent the year before. For a company that built its identity on being the industry’s profit machine, that’s not a bad year. That’s close to a wipeout.
The cause is almost entirely electric. In September 2025, Porsche announced it was delaying its next-generation EV platform, keeping combustion engines and plug-in hybrids in the Panamera and Cayenne well into the 2030s, and building a new SUV positioned above the Cayenne as a combustion-and-hybrid-only model after originally planning it as electric from day one. Porsche booked roughly 3.1 billion euros in extraordinary charges for 2025 tied to that pivot, including about 1.8 billion euros in depreciation and provisions from the platform delay alone. Deliveries fell 16.5 percent in the first half of 2026, and the share of battery-electric vehicles in Porsche’s lineup actually shrank, from 23.5 percent to 19.4 percent, the wrong direction for a company that spent most of the last decade promising the opposite.
Selling MHP is one piece of a larger cleanout. Porsche has already shut down its in-house battery-cell venture, wound down its e-bike brand, and pared back its stake in Bugatti-Rimac, moves Auto Wire covered in detail this summer. As of July 1, Porsche folded its dedicated Car-IT department into R&D and trimmed its executive board from eight departments to seven. MHP was simply next on the list of things that weren’t building sports cars.
Here’s the second wait, really. Porsche didn’t just build MHP, it had only just finished buying it. MHP started in 1996 as a small SAP consultancy in Ettlingen, near Karlsruhe, founded by two engineers. Porsche bought a minority stake within a few years and kept adding to it through the 2000s and 2010s. It didn’t own all of MHP until 2023, when it bought out the remaining outside shareholders specifically to bring digital-transformation expertise fully in-house, a very of-the-moment move for an era when every automaker’s investor deck promised it would become a software company. Three years later, Porsche reversed that entire bet and sold the whole thing to a conglomerate on the other side of the world.
None of this is new, even if the AI framing makes it feel that way. It’s a rerun of a playbook Western manufacturers ran in the 1990s and 2000s, spinning off captive IT departments to firms like TCS, Wipro, and Capgemini, then hiring those same firms back as vendors, trading fixed headcount for a flexible bill. The only difference this time is the label on the invoice. Back then it said IT services. Now it says AI Mobility Centre of Excellence.
None of this changes what’s parked in a Porsche dealership’s showroom today. But it explains why Porsche’s electric-only ambitions keep getting pushed back, why the next Cayenne-class flagship is arriving with a gas tank instead of a battery pack, and why the company has gotten noticeably quieter about the all-electric future it was practically shouting about five years ago. A company doesn’t unwind a three-decades-in-the-making consulting arm and delay its own next EV platform in the same year because business is good.
Porsche will lay out the rest of its Sportwagenschmiede 35 strategy at a Capital Markets Day on October 7. Expect more of the same: fewer departments, fewer non-core assets, and a renewed insistence that Porsche is, above all else, a sports car company. Building a consulting arm from scratch and buying out every last outside shareholder is how a car company convinces itself it can own its own digital future. Selling that same company three years later, and paying nearly four times the sale price to rent similar expertise back, is how a car company admits it can’t afford to.