Personnel costs in focus: employees on a production line at the VW main plant in Wolfsburg
Image: dpa
The core VW brand is struggling with low margins and high costs. Now it’s about tough cuts; many thousands of jobs are at stake.
Arno Antlitz doesn’t even try to sugarcoat the situation. For almost an hour and a half on Thursday morning, the CFO of the Volkswagen Group was grilled by stock market specialists about the business situation in a conference call – and again and again he came up with the group’s eponymous parent brand, the crisis-plagued VW brand. In the third quarter, their return on sales slipped to 2.4 percent. That is “well below expectations and certainly below our ambitions,” Antlitz rumbles.
Clear words from the Wolfsburg group’s top financial manager – and an insight into the mood surrounding the planned efficiency program for Germany’s largest car brand: For weeks, its management around brand boss Thomas Schäfer has been working with the works council on plans to increase earnings by 10 billion euros by 2026 improve and increase the return to 6.5 percent.