The sales of Volkswagen-Group improved again in the first quarter. As the Wolfsburg-based company announced on Friday, worldwide deliveries from the beginning of January to the end of March rose by 7.5 percent to just over two million vehicles compared to the same period last year. One reason for this is the gradually stabilizing supply of electronics.
There was significant growth for VW in the home market of Western Europe (26.9 percent) and in North America (22.1 percent). However, business remained significantly weaker in China (minus 14.5 percent) and in the conflict region of Central and Eastern Europe (minus 5.8 percent).
On the Chinese car market – the most important in the world – the VW Group with CEO Oliver Blume (54) had to record much stronger slumps at the beginning of the year – in January the drop in deliveries compared to the previous year was more than 40 percent. This was partly due to the additional days off around the New Year festival, but also to the after-effects of the corona waves. Nonetheless: In China, German carmakers are under increasing pressure from domestic manufacturers, who are much more successful with electric cars than their Western competitors. The topic was hotly debated at the world’s largest auto show in Shanghai this week. In the first quarter, the Chinese carmaker BYD, with a market share of eleven percent of the total market, i.e. including the still dominant combustion cars, pushed the VW brand, which had been the leading brand there for centuries, from first place.
Throughout the VW Group, sales of electric cars from around 99,000 in the previous year to 141,000 now. In Europe, the increase was even higher, at 68 percent to around 98,300 cars. The absolute values are of course rather low in relation to the sum of all drive types: the e-share was 6.9 percent worldwide.
Core brand VW achieves a small increase in sales
Among the individual brands, the main VW passenger car division achieved a mini plus of one percent in the first quarter, she got rid of a little more than a million vehicles worldwide. The company noted that sales of ID series e-models were developing well. In Europe, the approximately 70,000 cars delivered in the first quarter corresponded to a good half of all pure electric vehicles from the group.
Overall business was much better for all other brands – for example Seat/Cupra (up 37 percent), the light VW commercial vehicles (up 18.7 percent) and Skoda (up 12.6 percent). Audi managed to bring 7.9 percent more cars to customers than in the first three months of 2022, Porsche achieved an 18 percent increase in sales. The heavy trucks and buses of the commercial vehicle holding company Traton came to a delivery increase of almost a quarter.