Friday, July 9th, 2021
Hardly hit by the chip crisis
At VW, the money is flowing again in streams
So far, Volkswagen has coped with the burdens of the semiconductor crisis surprisingly well and has made a billion profit in the first half of the year. However, the group warns: The problem could shift and lead to impairments in the second half of the year.
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 result of around 11 billion euros on the basis of preliminary figures. With this key figure, the largest European car group is already above the value for the whole of 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 led to “very high sales” in the first half of the year, it said. The recovery was – based on the weak period of the previous year with the global spread of the pandemic – “continued to be 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 weakened initially, 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.
In Europe, deliveries 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. VW now spoke of the best sales result in a quarter since 1973.
Audi managed to grow to just under 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 so far not come true, as have others Providers earn well again.
In the current upswing, parts are missing in abundance
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, car manufacturers canceled large contingents of these components – in the current upswing, they are now lacking 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 should 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,” said Volkswagen as an updated assessment. So far, the income has flowed into the books, since the beginning 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.
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