Mr. Winterkorn emerged the victor on Saturday from a power struggle that broke into the open this month. Mr. Piëch, who had been either chief executive or chairman of the company since the early 1990s, had indicated in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel that he was disenchanted with the performance of his onetime protégé.

But Mr. Winterkorn refused to leave voluntarily. And he won the support of labor representatives, who under German law have half of the seats on the supervisory board, as well as the state of Lower Saxony, which owns 20 percent of Volkswagen’s voting shares.

The Porsche family, descendants of Ferdinand Porsche, designer of the car that later became known as the Beetle, also sided with Mr. Winterkorn. The Porsche family owns a majority of the voting shares. Mr. Piëch is a grandson of Mr. Porsche, but he has long had tense relations with his cousins.

Volkswagen benefited from the recovery of the European automobile market from lows, the figures released on Wednesday showed. The company’s unit sales in Western Europe rose 6.5 percent to 780,000 cars, including a 25 percent increase in Spain, which has been one of the countries hardest hit by the eurozone economic crisis.

In the United States, though, sales slipped 1.4 percent to about 132,000 cars during the quarter, including Audi and Porsche. Volkswagen-brand cars have only 2 percent of the market so far this year, according to Kelley Blue Book, down from 3 percent in 2012.

“VW is struggling because they don’t have the S.U.V. products they need right now,” said Karl Brauer, a senior analyst at Kelley Blue Book. “That’s the hot segment right now.”

Mr. Brauer said that VW sales in the United States could improve as the company rolled out the latest version of its Golf, which has received favorable reviews. Worldwide, profit on Volkswagen cars could begin to improve, Mr. Brauer said, as the company intensifies efforts to share components among many different vehicles, a strategy that reduces costs.