The dream of a robot car turned into a severe setback for Volkswagen. The billions in depreciation after the end of the project depresses the group profit. Volkswagen is sticking to its annual targets as far as possible.
The Volkswagen Group made significant gains in day-to-day business in the third quarter, but had to cut back on net profit and delivery targets for the full year. In the months of July to September, profit after tax fell by more than a quarter to 2.13 billion euros year-on-year, as the DAX company announced.
The reason was that Volkswagen had to write off 1.9 billion euros at the end of the software cooperation with the Argo holding. VW and partner Ford abandoned the robot car startup this week. VW confirmed the annual targets for sales and earnings, but sees deliveries only at the previous year's level of 8.9 million vehicles. So far, VW had targeted an increase of 5 to 10 percent.
The board of directors around the new CEO Oliver Blume confirmed the outlook for the year as a whole, despite the stubborn shortage of parts and an onset of a downturn in the industry. Europe's largest car group continues to assume that sales will grow between eight and 13 percent this year and that the operating return will end up at the upper end of the forecast range of between 7.0 and 8.5 percent.
Day-to-day business was much better than in the previous year's quarter, which was significantly impacted by supply bottlenecks, with sales increasing by a good 24 percent to 70.7 billion euros. Earnings before interest and taxes, which VW uses to measure its operational success, increased by around 53 percent to 4.27 billion euros. However, it was weaker than analysts had previously estimated.
