Bentley’s new head of gross sales and advertising and marketing is Alain Favey, a Volkswagen Group veteran who strikes to the position from Skoda.

Favey takes over the board-level place at Bentley from Chris Craft, who’s retiring from the trade after three years with Bentley and 27 years working for VW Group, Bentley stated in a statement on Friday.

Bentley and Skoda are VW Group manufacturers.

Craft was “deeply concerned in Bentley’s renewal” together with its transfer to a totally electrical future, Bentley stated. In November, Bentley turned the primary world automaker to offer a agency date by which era it will go electrical solely, saying that it’ll drop internal combustion engines from its cars by 2030.

Throughout his profession at VW Group, Craft was head of UK operations for Porsche, VW and Skoda at completely different occasions.

Favey has been Skoda’s gross sales and advertising and marketing boss since 2017. Throughout his tenure the Czech model had document car gross sales in 2017 and 2018. Favey led the launches of Skoda’s present mannequin vary, together with the model’s first full-electric car, the Enyaq compact SUV.

He joined VW Group in 2009 from Citroen as VW model’s head of gross sales for Europe earlier than turning into CEO of VW-owned Porsche Holding Salzburg, Europe’s largest automotive distributor.

Skoda CEO Thomas Schaefer thanked Favey for his work at Skoda in a LinkedIn post late February. “Due to you, we managed to ship a couple of million automobiles worldwide in 2020, regardless of the yr being dominated by the Corona disaster,” Schaefer wrote.

Favey’s place at Skoda has been taken by Martin Jahn, previously head of gross sales and advertising and marketing for FAW-Volkswagen in China.

Craft will retire from Bentley on the finish of April. Favey will be a part of Bentley in June.