“Actually, we have every reason to be optimistic. If it weren’t for the war in Ukraine, which of course primarily causes human tragedies, but also economic upheavals,” said Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess today, Tuesday, at the annual press conference, which was held online. Compared to Corona, the war could put a greater strain on the economies in Europe. “It is to be feared that we are not yet seeing the secondary effects,” said Diess. For many automotive suppliers in Upper Austria, Volkswagen is one of the leading buyers of their components.
The Wolfsburg-based company is already feeling the effects of rising raw material and energy prices, exchange rate effects and the shortage of materials. While the bottleneck in semiconductor chips in the global automotive industry has weighed heavily in recent years, the lack of cable harnesses from Ukraine is now causing corporations, as reported, to remove shifts in their factories or shut down production lines entirely for the time being. According to Diess, all Volkswagen locations in the heartland of Germany are affected – which also affects the suppliers in Upper Austria. Volkswagen has therefore started a process to move the production of the wiring harnesses to other countries, the manager said. This process is currently ongoing, but Diess did not give any details.
The figures: the car manufacturer was able to increase sales by twelve percent to 250 billion euros last year, and almost doubled operating profit before special items to 20 billion euros. Both indicators are at pre-crisis levels. Sales are still a bit far from that: Volkswagen sold eleven billion vehicles in 2019, but only 9.2 billion in 2020 and 8.6 billion in the previous year. Diess justified the fact that the result increased by saying that more high-margin vehicles were sold and available semiconductors were also installed there.
Yield pearl Porsche before IPO
Business drivers at Volkswagen in the past year were the premium brands Porsche, Audi and Bentley. With the exception of the Spanish brand Seat and the Munich-based commercial vehicle manufacturer MAN, where losses were incurred, all VW brands were in the black last year. The group intends to list the “return pearl” Porsche in the fourth quarter of this year. The return on sales of the sports car subsidiary was around 15 percent. In the event of an IPO, the Volkswagen-owning families Porsche and Piëch would again have direct access to Porsche AG, which went to VW after the lost takeover battle ten years ago.
With the Porsche IPO, Volkswagen wants to secure the necessary billions for an e-offensive: The construction of the planned six new battery cell plants in Europe alone is likely to cost around 20 billion euros. CEO Diess and CFO Arno Antlitz emphasized at the press conference that the Volkswagen Group is the market leader in Europe with a 25 percent market share for electric vehicles and is in second place in the USA with an eight percent market share for electric cars. By 2030, 60 percent of all vehicles sold by the Wolfsburg group should be electric. In the previous year, the proportion of fully electric vehicles was 5.1 percent. At the end of the year, the group had around 672,800 employees worldwide.
Source: Nachrichten
