2023 Author: Eric Donovan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 15:44
Last year, the Volkswagen Group's core car brand broke the six million mark for the first time. Since then it has been more or less downhill.
The Volkswagen Group's core car brand is noticeably losing speed after its record hunt in the previous year. With a further decline in sales in March, the brand with models such as the Golf or Passat has now been in reverse for six months. In March, deliveries decreased by 0.9 percent compared to the corresponding month of the previous year and thus reached 558,600 vehicles (March 2014: 563,600), as the Wolfsburg announced on Tuesday.
VW after the first quarter 1.3 percent bottom line
“The delivery results of our core Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand were also influenced in March by the challenging conditions in the markets in South America, especially Brazil, and the Russian market,” said Christian Klingler, Member of the Board of Management for Sales.
For the first quarter of the current year, the deficit compared to the first quarter of 2014 is 1.3 percent. This makes it more and more obvious that the core brand is reaching a preliminary peak in its growth. Last year, VW-Pkw delivered 6.12 million vehicles to customers worldwide, breaking the six million mark for the first time. The brand has doubled its deliveries since 2004. But the situation changed in the last quarter of last year.
Growth for VW in Europe and Germany
While the brand in Europe grew by almost two percent in the first quarter and even increased by a good eight percent in Germany, the values in Russia halved (minus 47.2 percent). The company is already reducing shifts there because the factories are barely being used to capacity.
The fact that the usual engine China, by far the most important single market for the Wolfsburg-based company, lost 0.6 percent in March also has a powerful impact. Before that, it had always grown in double digits for a long time, until the change started there at the end of 2014.
In Brazil, the most important single market in South America, the first quarter saw an 18 percent drop. The car brand accounts for half of the turnover of the entire Dax group. The sales with Golf, Passat, Polo and Co. is the heart of the twelve-brand group. (dpa)
