Unprofitable Swedish car maker Saab expects unit sales to stagnate this year, its head told Germany’s auto, motor und sport magazine, which reported the General Motors unit could turn profitable in 2010.
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Saab sold 125,000 units worldwide last year, less than the 133,00 it sold in the previous year, the magazine said in an advanced abstract cited by the Reuters news agency.
“We expect roughly the same scale for 2008,” Jan-Ake Jonsson told the German magazine. “It is our target to sell 150,000 to 200,000 units per year. But in order to reach such annual sales we need the new models,” he said.
According to the magazine, Saab had said earlier it could reach break-even with annual sales of 180,000 units but the benchmark would only be reached in 2010, according to internal plans.
Saab suffered a 6.1% drop in 2007 sales in Europe to about 84,900 cars, Reuters said.
In 2007, Saab fell short of is own targets, which Carl-Peter Forster, president of General Motors Europe, had lowered to 160.000 to 170,000 units in June last year, it said, citing an earlier media report.
Earlier targets set by Forster’s predecessor Peter Augustsson, who left the company in March 2006, aimed to sell 250,000 units per year, the media report had said.
