Surprise for cars and vans: Daimler clearly exceeds expectations

Surprise for cars and vans
Daimler clearly exceeds expectations

The car manufacturer Daimler gives a first look at the business in the Corona year. The company surprises with a strong final spurt. The operating result is more than a fifth above expectations. The group is confident about the current year.

The Stuttgart car manufacturer Daimler has exceeded its own profit expectations and the forecasts of the analysts with an unexpected final spurt. Daimler announced that earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) were 6.6 billion euros last year. Experts had only expected the group to average just over 5.2 billion euros in EBIT, and the carmaker itself had promised a stable result of 4.3 billion in November – and thus targeted the 2019 result.

Daimler 58.70

"All business areas have contributed to this success," said the press release. But especially the business with cars and vans developed significantly better than expected. In the end, the division EBIT was just under 5.2 billion euros. Analysts had expected less than 3.9 billion euros. Daimler had to cope with almost 1.9 billion euros in special charges from restructuring the company.

For the first quarter of 2021, however, the car manufacturer is reluctant. The shortages in the supply of 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 "an expected good market demand" and the latest savings, business is expected to develop positively if further lockdowns do not thwart plans.

Daimler plans to publish the complete set of figures for 2020 on February 18. Then there will also be a specific forecast for the current year. In the pre-Corona year 2019, Daimler suffered a slump in sales due to high costs from the diesel scandal. In the end, the bottom line was almost two thirds less, at 2.7 billion euros. The EBIT fell by around 60 percent to 4.3 billion euros. The income had meanwhile risen to almost 173 billion euros.

. (tagsToTranslate) Economy (t) Daimler AG (t) Quarterly figures (t) Corona crisis (t) Car manufacturer (t) German automaker