Business Daily meets: Lamborghini's Stephan Winklemann

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The president and CEO of Lamborghini doesn’t just sell supercars, he sells a symbol of status, speed, and style.

But what does it take to lead one of the world’s most iconic luxury brands?

Theo Leggett meets Stephan Winklemann at a Lamborghini showroom in London, UK, to explore his journey from paratrooper to CEO of some of the top automobile companies.

We hear how he steers businesses through a worldwide economic recession, a pandemic, and global trade wars. Plus, with the rise of electric vehicles – what is the future for the luxury car company?

Produced and presented by Theo Leggett Additional production: Niamh McDermott

(Image: Stephan Winkelmann sat in front of a yellow Lamborghini wearing a suit and grinning into the camera)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts.
0:08.1	Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I'm Theo Leggett.
0:11.9	In today's full-throttle programme, I'll be speaking to a man who wanted to be a paratrooper,
0:17.1	but ended up working in finance before becoming a car salesman.
0:22.6	Yet the cars he sells today are not your ordinary runabouts. We're talking a thousand horsepower, super streamlined carbon
0:28.7	fibre bodywork and enough computing power to steer a spaceship. Stefan Vinkleman is the president
0:35.3	and chief executive of Lamborghini, one of the most exotic brands in the business.
0:40.6	His job sounds like a schoolboy's dream, but for him it wasn't.
0:45.3	When I was a kid, I was more into motorcycles.
0:48.4	When I grew up in Rome, there was not the helmet law, so we were always drying without any boundaries. There was freedom, and therefore
0:56.9	I was more into motorbikes. We'll be hearing how he ended up at Lamborghini, how he steered the
1:02.8	company through a series of crises, and asking what the future holds for the supercar business.
1:08.4	The biggest challenge is for sure how the transition is going to be in the future for a
1:15.1	company like ours into electrification or not.
1:17.9	All that's coming up in Business Daily Meets.
1:25.4	He drives a Lambo.
1:27.7	He drives a Lambo. He drives a Lambo.
1:28.6	He drives a Lambo.
1:31.4	Lamborghini is a car company, but what it really sells is a lifestyle.
1:35.6	It may be owned by Germany's Volkswagen, but its heritage is all Italian, with a bit of Hollywood glamour thrown in.
1:42.3	And forget all the power and all the speed. For many buyers,
1:45.9	the whole point of a supercar is quite simply to show off.
	...

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