The money is flowing again at Volkswagen, the Corona crash from the first half of last year seems to have been forgotten. Things are now going much better across the board.
The VW Group emerged from the Corona crisis with momentum in the first half of the year and earned a lot from the growing car sales. For the period from January to June, the Wolfsburg-based company reported an operating profit of around 11 billion euros on Friday based on preliminary figures.
With this key figure, the largest European car group is already above the value for the entire year 2020, in which it had an operating profit of a good 10.6 billion euros before special items.
The surprisingly published key data are mainly fed by the rising demand. Increased deliveries in the first half of the year led to “very high sales”, it said. The recovery was – based on the weak period of the previous year with the global spread of the pandemic – “still strong”.
Especially during the lockdown in the second quarter of 2020, closed car dealerships, temporarily completely shut down plants and unsettled customers in many countries had left the group in the deep red. Before special items, the half-year loss in ongoing business at that time totaled 803 million euros.
After the home market of Western Europe had also initially weakened, sales of the VW Group rose significantly across the board of late. In May, around 860,000 cars sold worldwide accounted for an increase of 41 percent compared to the same month last year. Deliveries in Europe roughly doubled, and in North America the group reported an increase of 83 percent.
For the important US market there are already more detailed figures for the second quarter. The Wolfsburg-based company sold more than 120,000 new vehicles from its core brand VW Passenger Cars, an increase of 72 percent. It was even the best result in a quarter of the year since 1973. Audi achieved an increase to almost 67,000 units, almost double the value for the United States in the second quarter of 2020.
The fears of a prolonged downturn in the entire auto industry after the Corona low at the beginning to the middle of last year have not come true so far, and other providers are also earning well again. However, the industry is still concerned with one major factor of uncertainty: the global supply crisis for electronic chips.
Because of the slump in 2020, carmakers canceled large contingents of these components – in the current upswing, they are now missing the parts in abundance. Numerous shifts were canceled, short-time work followed, and hundreds of thousands of planned models could not be manufactured. Due to extreme weather conditions and fires, semiconductor companies in Japan and the USA also left more of their already limited capacities idle. “We will feel that,” said VW boss Herbert Diess in May.
This critical shortage is far from over – on the contrary. They are likely to drag on well into the third and fourth quarters. “The impairment from the shortage of semiconductors has shifted and will more likely lead to impairments in the second half of the year,” Volkswagen now indicated as an updated assessment.
So far, the income has flowed into the books, since the start of the year it has been a good 10 billion euros net from the core auto business. If production plans have to be cut further due to a lack of semiconductors, a lot of money threatens to be lost. VW will announce its full business figures for the first half of the year on July 29th.
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
