Earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) amounted to 6.6 billion euros last year, said Daimler on Thursday evening based on preliminary figures. Compared to the weak previous year, this is an increase of 53 percent. According to Daimler, experts believed that the company would only have an operating profit of over 5.2 billion euros. The Stuttgart-based carmaker had promised a stable result of 4.3 billion in November. The DAX group named successful cost discipline and good market demand as reasons for the better performance.
“All business areas have contributed to this success,” said the announcement from the automaker led by Ola Källenius (51). But especially the subsidiary Mercedes-Benz Cars and Vans developed significantly better than expected. At 5.2 billion euros, the operating result exceeded analyst forecasts by almost 1.3 billion euros. In the previous year, when the Passenger Cars and Vans divisions were still independent, they had only earned around 300 million euros because of a high loss at Vans.
Prospects for the first quarter of 2021 are still poor – also because of computer chips
The car and van sales of the brand with the star were down due to the lockdown in the spring, but then picked up thanks to the rapid recovery China quickly. For the year as a whole, sales of 2.164 million vehicles were only 7.5 percent below the previous year. At 6.9 percent, the return on sales was also significantly higher than expected on the market.
Cost savings – for example due to the elimination of business trips, costly advertising campaigns and driving events for new models, and also through staff reductions – allowed the freely available funds to rise sharply. In the industrial business, the financial cushion tripled compared to 2019 to 8.3 billion euros. The car company thus strengthened its crisis resistance in the middle of the pandemic.
However, Daimler is cautious about the first quarter of 2021. The Bottlenecks in the supply of computer chips and the consequences of the ongoing corona pandemic would affect the first three months of the year, warned Daimler. Overall, however, in view of “the sustained and successful cost discipline in the fourth quarter and expected good market demand”, business development is expected to be positive. The prerequisite is that no further lockdowns affect the business.