Porsche yesterday revealed the financial pain of its failed attempt to take over Volkswagen, after it posted a £3.9bn loss.
The audacious attempt to consume Volkswagen (which is 82 times larger than Porsche in terms of car sales) has not only resulted in the precise opposite, it has also made Porsche look more like a hedge fund than a manufacturer of sports cars.
But despite the fact that Porsche SE - the company created for the VW takeover - lost £3.9bn after posting a profit of £7.7bn for the previous financial year, Porsche AG, the sports car side of the business, remains in reasonable health.
Yesterday's figures show that Porsche AG made a decent 10.3 per cent operating profit margin on its car sales, against a figure of 2.4 per cent for VW.
Porsche's sales figures have suffered badly in the past year, however. Year-on-year sales were down 24 per cent overall, with 911 sales down 14 per cent, Cayenne sales down a quarter, and Cayman/Boxster sales down a whopping 40 per cent.
It also seems as though the Porsche-VW ownership saga could finally be drawing to an official close. The two companies reached a deal last week to sell just under 50 per cent of Porsche's sports car business to VW by the end of the year, while the sports car maker will be entirely subsumed into the VW empire by 2011.
In the short term, a VW shareholders' meeting next week could agree on special rights for Lower Saxony - the state that owns 20 per cent of VW. If plans to grant the state the right to appoint two members of VW's supervisory board go ahead, Porsche's control over VW would be legally over.