Volkswagen sells fewer cars: China and Audi slow down - E-cars falter
The poor performance of Audi, sluggish business in China, the lull in electric cars: The troubled automaker Volkswagen has experienced a decline in sales for the year 2024 across the entire group. Worldwide, 2.3 percent fewer cars of all group brands were delivered than a year before, as the Wolfsburg-based company announced. The self-imposed target of 9 million deliveries was still achieved - albeit narrowly: by the end, 9.027 million vehicles were delivered.
"In a challenging market environment, we delivered a total of 9 million vehicles in 2024," said Group CEO Oliver Blume. Audi Sales Director Marco Schubert, who is also responsible for this area in the entire group, spoke of a "solid performance."
Especially in the final quarter, things went better than before. After sales were almost 3 percent down by the end of September, they were only 0.8 percent down in the following three months.
Lull in China and electric cars
The burden for the group is mainly the China business and the lull in electric cars. In China, sales collapsed by almost ten percent, and worldwide sales of electric cars shrank by 3.4 percent, in the USA even by 30 percent. Worldwide, 745,000 electric models of all group brands were delivered last year. Only one in twelve new cars was thus a pure electric vehicle.
"In China, competition is still characterized by a massive price war," explained Schubert, referring to what was long the largest market for the Wolfsburg company.
In the final quarter, however, sales there were almost back to the previous year's level. And in internal combustion engine vehicles, Volkswagen remains the leader with over 20 percent market share. However, in the booming electric car market in China and overall, local challenger BYD has long since overtaken. New models from the cooperation with XPeng are now expected to bring about change for VW. In 2025, the market in China is still expected to be challenging, it was said.
Home market shrinks
In the German home market, the group lost 2.2 percent, while sales in Western Europe overall remained almost stable with a minus of 0.4 percent. There were significant increases, however, in North (6 percent) and South America (15 percent). Nevertheless, in both regions combined, VW sells only just over half as many cars as in China alone.
Especially the core brand VW suffers from high costs and low capacity utilization of its plants. The company and the union had reached an agreement on a restructuring program shortly before Christmas after lengthy negotiations. In the German VW plants, technical capacity is to be reduced by over 700,000 vehicles. 35,000 jobs will be cut by 2030. The job cuts are to be made without compulsory redundancies.
Audi Weighs Down
The blame for the sales decline ultimately lay less with the struggling core brand - but rather with Audi. The Ingolstadt-based VW subsidiary recorded a sales drop of 12 percent. For the core brand Volkswagen passenger cars, which accounts for more than half of all sales, the decline was 1.4 percent, and for Porsche, it was 3 percent. On the other hand, Seat/Cupra (7.5 percent) and Skoda (6.9 percent) reported gains. However, these increases could not offset the declines at the other brands.
Across the group, the decrease was smaller than for other manufacturers. At BMW and Mercedes-Benz, sales in 2024 had each shrunk by about four percent. In 2023, the VW group had delivered more than 9.2 million vehicles of all brands, significantly more than the year before. VW had given up the goal of exceeding this figure by up to three percent in 2024 already in September.
Europe's largest automaker is far from its previous record levels: in 2019, Volkswagen had reached almost 11 million deliveries, making it the global number one ahead of Toyota. VW has since abandoned the battle for global market leadership. More important than sheer volume is profitability, it was stated.
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