STUTTGART / WOLFSBURG (dpa-AFX) – German car manufacturers are on the up again. This is shown by the latest sales figures from Daimler, Volkswagen (Volkswagen (VW) vz) and Porsche. Daimler still wants to save a large amount of personnel. Up to 20,000 jobs are at risk, as the German press agency learned on Friday from corporate circles. A spokesman for the General Works Council at Daimler said that the discussions with the management continued and that they were quite controversial. On the basis of preliminary figures, the Dax (DAX 30) group recorded a loss before interest and taxes of 1.68 billion euros in the second quarter.
In the second quarter, the Stuttgart-based company performed better in the second quarter than feared due to the corona restrictions. The recovery from the standstill in factories and car dealerships around the world was surprisingly good. In June, the development was even “strong”, it was said on Thursday evening at Daimler.
The main Mercedes-Benz brand delivered 457,711 cars worldwide from April to June, a good 20 percent less than a year earlier. This was mainly due to Europe and North America. In China, Mercedes was already back on the growth track and achieved an increase in deliveries of almost 22 percent in the world’s largest car market. Even including the weak first quarter, the car manufacturer has had a positive balance there since the beginning of the year.
Sales figures in the Volkswagen Group also started to rise because business in China picked up. In June, deliveries worldwide declined by 17.5 percent year-on-year to around 804,000 vehicles, as the company announced on Friday. For the entire first half of the year there is a decrease of 27.4 percent to just under 3.9 million vehicles in the sales balance sheet.
While the Chinese business continued to recover in June (minus 3.9 percent) and for the rest of the Asia-Pacific region there was even a slight increase of 0.2 percent, sales declines remained in the home market of Western Europe (minus 29.9), as well as in South America (minus 27.0 percent) and North America (minus 22.8 percent).
The sports car manufacturer Porsche delivered almost 117,000 vehicles to customers worldwide in the first half of the year. That was twelve percent less than in the first six months of the previous year, as Porsche announced. Deliveries in Germany decreased by 25 percent. In Europe as a whole, the minus was 18 percent. In the USA, the second largest single market, it was 20 percent. In China, where Porsche sells most of its cars worldwide, the market grew so much again that there was only a 7 percent drop in the first half of the year
