According to its own statement on Friday, Volkswagen (VW) sold 78,281 new cars in the second quarter, around a third less than a year ago. There were clear cuts in almost all models. Sales of the Atlas and Tiguan urban SUVs, which have long been very popular with US customers, also collapsed again. The half-year balance was also meager: In the first six months, sales fell by around 32 percent to 143,279 cars.
The German premium supplier BMW also had to cope with a severe drop in sales on the US market. With 78,905 cars from the BMW brand, the DAX group got rid of 18.3 percent fewer vehicles than in the same period last year, as he announced on Friday evening. Delivery problems would have burdened the stocks of the dealers, the group said. Sedans in particular sold worse. On the other hand, BMW was able to make some gains in the SUV segment, which is particularly popular in the USA. Sales of the small car subsidiary Mini fell by almost half.
US sales by VW subsidiary Audi fell by 28 percent to 48,049 cars in the three months to the end of June. On a half-year basis, Audi is down a good 31 percent with 83,554 new cars. On the other hand, one of the few positive exceptions in the second quarter was the sports car manufacturer Porsche. Here sales increased by 2.8 percent to 19,487 cars. The pearl of yield in the VW group was thus able to assert itself against the weak market trend. After the first six months, however, Porsche also posted a drop of 10.5 percent to 32,529 cars. Figures from Mercedes-Benz were not yet available.
The largest US automaker, General Motors (GM), posted a 15 percent drop in sales to 582,401 new vehicles in the second quarter. The group continues to struggle with supply chain problems and a persistent shortage of computer chips. According to GM, around 95,000 vehicles could not be delivered recently because components were missing. The automaker is working closely with suppliers to fix the problems as quickly as possible. GM expects a quarterly profit of between 1.6 billion and 1.9 billion dollars – which is significantly less than the average analysts expected.
The shares of BMW and Volkswagen initially went up on Monday before the mood turned sour. On XETRA, VW’s preferred shares ultimately lost 0.38 percent to EUR 127.00, while BMW shares lost 1.32 percent to EUR 72.79 at the close of trading.
HERNDON (dpa-AFX)
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