Volkswagen reported passenger car deliveries up 9.4% year on year in the first four months of 2012 to 1.81m vehicles, with over 456,000 shipped in April alone.
“The brand made a very good start to the second quarter,” said sales and marketing chief Christian Klingler in a statement. “However, given the situation [in] west European markets we remain very vigilant.”
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The automaker sold 589,800 vehicles in Europe to April, up 4%. In central and eastern Europe, deliveries increased 56% to 84,000 units. In Russia, the region’s largest single market, sales doubled to 50,500.
In western Europe, excluding Germany, there was a 5.1% decline to 303,400 vehicles due to the difficult situation in the overall market. In contrast, deliveries rose 4.7% in Germany to 202,400.
Asia-Pacific sales rose 13.4% to 725,100 with 653,300 of those delivered in China, including Hong Kong, the region’s largest single market.
North America sales “also developed very well”, up 25.7% to 187,900.
South America deliveries rose just 0.6% to 246,300.
