The car manufacturer Volkswagen with CEO Oliver Blume (55) is struggling with high costs, especially for its core brand VW Passenger Cars. At the Wolfsburg heart of Europe’s largest car company, the operating return on sales fell to 3.4 percent in the first nine months of the current year, as the company announced on Thursday. A year earlier, the operating margin was 4.7 percent.
The other brands in the so-called Core brand group (Skoda, Seat/Cupra, VW Commercial Vehicles), however, were able to increase their profitability year-on-year.
Volkswagen justified the weaker performance with, among other things, higher product costs and a shift towards cheaper cars. In addition, as already known, there was a burden Loss of production by a supplier due to the floods in Slovenia in the third quarter.
Annual forecast had already been reduced
VW brand boss Thomas Schäfer (53) is currently still working on the Details of a billion-dollar savings program for the group’s mass brands
to increase returns. To do this, he will, among other things, hold discussions with the employee representatives. The VW brand is considered a case for restructuring: CEO Blume wants Schäfer to improve the result by ten billion euros by 2026 in order to make the unit sustainable.
Preliminary figures for the entire group Volkswagen already on Friday presented, which the Wolfsburg-based company has now confirmed. The group increased sales and profits significantly in the third quarter and made twice as much profit as the year before. However, this was mainly due to depreciation worth billions in the same period last year. Sales rose by almost twelve percent to 78.8 billion euros. The operating result grew by almost 15 percent to 4.89 billion euros.
Because hedging transactions for raw materials and energy are having a more negative impact this year than initially expected, VW last week reduced its expectations for profits from daily business for the year as a whole.