Preliminary balance sheet and forecast
VW subsidiary Porsche wants to tear around – additional costs 2025
Porsche, like other German car manufacturers, is in a difficult location. A falling profit margin is characteristic. Management has ideas to counter this.
The sports car manufacturer Porsche wants to defend itself against the crisis with an expensive program of measures. This year, the Stuttgarters will take a lot of money to develop new cars with combustion engine or plug-in hybrid drives and offer more special and exclusive equipment.
CEO Oliver Blume accepts a significant absorption of the operational margin, as the VW concert daughter surprisingly announced on Thursday evening. According to the preliminary figures, the company was already under significant pressure last year. The management promised a stable dividend.
Analyst sees necessary changes
Investors have hardly enjoyed the stock for some time. The record rally after the IPO in September 2022 lasted only a few months before the record high was reached at a good 120 euros in May 2023. After that it went downwards, currently the share certificate is only worth around half as much as in its best times and is a good quarter below the issue price of 82.50 euros.
JPMorgan analyst Jose Asumendi spoke in a first reaction of necessary changes. They are a positive step regarding the drive strategy and made it possible for the car manufacturer to return to growth in the next two years. He capped his expectations of the profit because of the upcoming financial burdens.
According to preliminary calculations, the operational margin of Porsche – that is, the proportion that stays on the sales as an operational profit – was at the lower end of the targeted range of 14 to 15 percent last year. In 2023, Porsche had reached 18 percent. The weak performance in China and the introduction of new models in most series of the car manufacturer had a stressful effect.
This year, the margin is likely to slip to 10 to 12 percent due to the expensive program to strengthen short and medium-term earnings, but also due to the market-related sales expectations. Porsche actually has completely different ambitions: In the long term, Blume wants to earn more than 20 percent return on sales.
However, high investments are now necessary. Porsche wants to relax money for new models and for battery activities, the organization is also to be rebuilt. Specifically, the company was not in the message.
In 2025, the management expects the measures to be exposed to the automotive sector in the automotive sector (Netto -Cashflow Automobile) – i.e. without financial services – of up to around 800 million euros.
Sales should remain stable
Porsche 2025 sees sales at 39 to 40 billion euros. The Swabians had recently planned this magnitude for the past year. Porsche should also have ended up, because as it was said, the other most important performance indicators “did not show any significant deviations from the forecast bandwidths”.
At the weekend, the car maker announced that CFO Lutz Meschke and Detlev Sales Manager should vacate her posts. The company did not give any reasons, but the weak performance of experts is the weak performance last year, especially in China.
Porsche and Audi are actually the large earnings pearls in the Volkswagen Group support, but Audi also weakens. Volkswagen as a group even had to stop his profit forecast twice in 2024. A spokesman for the VW Group did not want to comment on the communication of Porsche on Thursday evening. Analysts recently expected that the situation in the group improved somewhat in the fourth quarter.
In any case, Porsche wants to keep the dividend for the past year. For 2023, the owners of the preferred share listed in the Dax received 2.31 euros. Porsche AG plans to present the detailed annual report on the previous year on March 12th.
dpa
Source: Stern
