Wednesday 17th March 2021
"Significant increase" targeted
VW is getting in position to catch up
With its core brand, Volkswagen wants to significantly increase both sales and revenue this year. To do this, the car manufacturer is planning to reduce costs more intensively. In the current year, however, major investments are still to be made – especially in electric cars.
Volkswagen's core brand wants to catch up quickly after the noticeably weaker pandemic year 2020. The company in Wolfsburg announced that it was aiming for a "significant increase" in deliveries in the coming months. In addition, they want "to be significantly higher in sales than in 2020". The main division VW Passenger Cars suffered considerable losses, especially last spring, due to the sharp drop in demand, then the situation improved again.
"Despite the setbacks caused by the Corona, we continue to work consistently to achieve our margin target of 6 percent in 2023," said Brand CFO Alexander Seitz. In order to achieve this goal, VW intends, as announced, to further reduce costs. Fixed costs are expected to decrease by 5 percent by 2023. Among other things, the freezing of the workforce to the level of January 2021 in combination with old-age part-time work will contribute to this. In addition, the productivity of the plants should increase by 5 percent annually and material costs should decrease by 7 percent.
It is now important that the further course of the corona and the delivery bottlenecks for electronic semiconductors remain in view, it said. Overall, the brand made it into the black last year after some uncertainty. In the end, there was an operating profit of 454 million euros, after the first half of the year, the cars with the VW logo had accumulated an operating loss of 1.5 billion euros.
Sales of e-cars more than double
Compared to the previous year, however, the corona damper became very clear: Sales slumped by almost a fifth to 71.1 billion euros, while sales fell by 15.1 percent to around 5.3 million cars compared to the previous year.
VW intends to continue investing heavily in the current year. In 2021, more than 450,000 electrified vehicles, i.e. both fully battery-powered and hybrid vehicles, should be delivered to customers – more than twice as many as in the previous year. Cars will also be sold online from summer onwards. Then VW also wants to test subscription models. Additional functions, for example for navigation, should be able to be booked online. The car manufacturer hopes that this will generate sales in the three-digit million range in the next few years.
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