At Volkswagen, the business prospects remain cloudy. At the weekend, the group once again scaled back its expectations for this year.
The troubled Volkswagen Group is once again lowering its outlook for the current financial year. Instead of an increase in deliveries of up to 3 percent compared to the previous year’s figure of 9.2 million vehicles, the Wolfsburg-based company is now only expecting around 9 million sales, as they announced on Friday after the stock market closed. The previously targeted increase in sales of up to 5 percent above the 322 billion euros generated last year is also no longer applicable – now there will only be 320 billion euros in sales.
CEO Oliver Blume also expects profitability to be weaker: He now estimates the operating result at 18 billion euros and thus an operating profit margin of around 5.6 percent. Most recently, the company had assumed a return on sales of 6.5 to 7.0 percent. VW had already lowered its earnings forecast in July due to expected costs for the Audi factory in Brussels, which was in jeopardy. The Volkswagen preferred shares listed in the Dax lost 3.2 percent to the Xetra closing level after trading on Friday on the Tradegate trading platform.
The group justified the cut forecast with weaker than expected results for the core brand VW Passenger Cars, for VWN’s light commercial vehicles and for the components division. The company currently wants to significantly expand its austerity measures for its core brand and has terminated the employment security scheme that has existed for decades; redundancies and plant closures are up for debate. The economic environment and weaker development in the financial services division also had a negative impact, VW said.
Source: Stern
