Founding Members

SEAT, S.A., Martorell. SEAT, S.A. is a Spanish automobile manufacturer with its head office in Martorell, Spain. It was founded on 9 May 1950 by the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI), a state-owned industrial holding company. It is currently a fully owned subsidiary of the German Volkswagen Group, as a member of the now-defunct Audi Brand Group, together with Audi and Lamborghini. It is marketed as a car maker with a youthful, sporty profile. Within Volkswagen and under the Audi Brand, SEAT has been developed as a group with subsidiary companies (the SEAT Group). ‘SEAT, S.A.’ is the parent company.

The headquarters of SEAT, S.A. are located at SEAT’s industrial complex in Martorell near Barcelona, Spain. In 2000, annual production peaked at over 500,000 units. By 2006, over 16 million cars had been produced by SEAT, including over 6 million at the Martorell plant. Three-quarters of the annual production is exported to over seventy countries worldwide..

The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC) is a public institution dedicated to higher education and research that offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees and continuing education courses and specialises in the fields of architecture, engineering and technology. With nearly 30,000 students and 3,000 professors and researchers, the UPC is a leader in knowledge transfer, innovation, entrepreneurship and the generation of patents, as well as collaboration with industry. Currently, it has collaboration agreements with around 2,500 companies, and academic and research partnerships with prestigious universities and institutions around the world.

 The UPC, which is an International Campus of Excellence, is ranked in major national and international rankings and participates in numerous national and international R&D projects. It was the top Spanish university in technology transfer and innovation in the 2015 U-Ranking, among the 50 best universities worldwide in architecture and civil engineering in the 2016 QS World University Rankings by Subject and among the top 150 universities in the world under 50 years old in the 2016 THE ranking.

The Volkswagen Group with its headquarters in Wolfsburg is one of the world’s leading automobile manufacturers and the largest carmaker in Europe.

Due to difficult market conditions in 2015, the number of Group vehicles delivered to customers dropped to 9.931 million (2014: 10.137 million). The share of the world passenger car market amounts to 12.3 percent.

In Western Europe, nearly one in four new cars (24.4 percent) is made by the Volkswagen Group. Group sales revenue in 2015 totaled €213 billion (2014: €202 billion), while negative earnings after tax amounted to €–1.4 billion (2014: €11.1 billion).

The Group comprises twelve brands from seven European countries: Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Audi, SEAT, ŠKODA, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Ducati, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Scania and MAN.