Porsche is concerned about short-term thinking

Porsche, the world's most profitable car company, argues that its shares should be listed on the exchange without the requirement to report earnings every three months.

Deutsche Boerse, the exchange's parent company, has insisted that all its top listed companies should report on a quarterly basis, as part of an initiative to bring German rules in line with those in the United States.

Now, Porsche has taken legal action to overturn that stipulation.

"Porsche relies on the credibility of its solid long-term strategy and a substantial and continuous policy of disclosure," the company said in a statement, arguing that quarterly reports produced an overly short-term outlook.

Reporting retorting

The row centres on Deutsche Boerse's most rigorous market segment, the Prime Standard, which groups companies - 379 of them so far - that meet global standards of corporate governance.

Porsche would like its shares included in Prime Standard, and argues that it meets all the criteria - except that it is only willing to produce a financial report every six months.

Exclusion from Prime Standard also means exclusion from the Dax, the main German share benchmark, and therefore makes Porsche's shares less likely to be bought by large investment funds which track indexes.

The argument between Porsche and Deutsche Boerse has been raging since 2001, when the car maker was delisted from the MDax index.

It is seen as a test case for the development of tighter corporate governance in Germany, where - as in much of the rest of Europe - rules have tended to be more lenient than the US.