Erich Sixt insisted on reporting four times a year on the current business figures of the car rental company from Pullach. With the handover of the chairmanship to his two sons Alexander and Konstantin in the spring, this practice will be a thing of the past. For the first time, CFO Kai Andrejewski was allowed to announce the balance sheet for the third quarter alone, the Sixt brothers only want to go to the press when it comes to annual and half-year balance sheets. Despite Corona, Andrejewski was able to report the best quarter in the company’s history: Before taxes, the listed company achieved a profit of 253.2 million euros – almost 73 percent more than in the third quarter of 2019, i.e. before the start of the pandemic. Operating sales in the months of July to September were also slightly higher than the same period in 2019, at EUR 795 million.
The fact that this was less than 460 million euros a year ago shows what Sixt is now benefiting from: namely, from the fact that both the number of holiday trips and business trips recovered significantly from summer to autumn. Andrejewski said that Sixt was now driving “out of the tunnel into bright daylight”. Especially with private trips there are “catch-up effects”, which is why the summer season has been extended. “Sixt can benefit more than our competitors from the current market situation in the European and US rental industry and thus further improve its market position,” said Andrejewski.
One of the reasons he cited was that Sixt had continued to invest internationally despite the crisis. In the USA, the company has more than doubled its sales since the beginning of the year, now with 94 stations. In addition, Sixt was able to expand the fleet despite the shortage of new vehicles. Andrejewski also expects a record for the full year: namely earnings before taxes of 390 to 450 million euros – in 2019 it was 308 million euros, in the previous year minus 82 million euros. Group sales are expected to be between 2.1 and 2.3 billion euros; in 2019 they were 2.5 billion euros.