Volkswagen Expecting an Increase Sales and Profit This Year

By: Natalie Anderson

Volkswagen has announced recently that it is expecting for profit and sales to rise this year especially since the Skoda Fabia and Audi A5 models are doing pretty well in the market plus the corporate overhaul that the company is employing is reducing production costs.

The company's chief executive Martin Winterkorn announced during the company's annual conference that it is expecting profit before interest, taxes and one-time items to be higher than the 4.4 billion euros or $5.78 billion it has obtained for the year 2006.

He also said that the sales for the first two months of the company has already record an increase of 8.3 percent to 862,000 vehicles which is a good start for this year. He further added that the company is expecting to meet its goal of increasing 2008 pretax profit to 5.1 billion compared to the 1.1 billion euros in 2004 which is the target set by Bernd Pischetsrieder, who is the former chief executive. It should be noted that it was through the efforts of Piech and Winterkorn that Pistchetsrider was ousted on January 1.

Volkswagen shares increase by 3 percent to 102.96 euros

Last month, Europe's largest automaker and producer of the popular has reported that their income has more than doubled reaching 2.75 billion euros which they attributed to the launching of their new models, the disposal of Europcar vehicle-rental unit and the tax gain. Total revenue has increased by 12 percent to 104.9 billion euros.

The company has also reported its fourth quarter results and said that its income obtained has more than tripled reaching 1.54 billion euros from 435 million euros resulting from an 11 percent sales increase to 27.8 billion euros.

The Audi team that Winterkorn has brought with him including Walter de Silva, head of design and Ulrich Hackenberg, engineering chief has spent two months just to modify the new version of Volkswagen's Golf hatchback, which currently is VW's best-selling vehicle. Aside from the Golf hatchback the team is also working on other models that Wolfgang Bernhard, the former Volkswagen brand chief had started like the Scirocco sports hatchback and a new compact sport utility vehicle, the Tiguan.

CEO Winterkorn said 'We will continue to work intensely on productivity and quality. We want to further increase the brand's passion for building cars." Volkswagen is also counting on its new models to increase its sales in the US. The total loss that VW has obtained for 2006 for its North American sales has narrowed to 607 million euros compared to the loss of 866 million euros in 2005. CEO Winterkorn has also added, "we still have quite a bit to do here to return to our successful growth path."

CEO Winterkorn is working to create a three-way combination to Volkswagen's commercial-vehicles unit and that includes the Munich-based truck maker MAN and the Swedish truckmaker Scania of which Volkswagen is the biggest shareholder.

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