Volkswagen posted a group record for deliveries to customers in June as strong growth at its VW, Audi and Skoda brands compensated for a weaker Seat, Europe’s largest car maker told Reuters.
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Preliminary estimates reportedly show deliveries rose 10.6% to 489,500 units last month – for the first half, the German group sold 2,558,000 vehicles, a gain of 1.7%.
“The figures look very strong, and an 11% rise for June underlines signals that the second quarter should be clearly better than the first,” Metzler Bank analyst Juergen Pieper told the news agency.
The report said Volkswagen brand passenger car deliveries achieved the highest global sales figure for June on record, at 282,700 units, a rise of 9.8% year on year, helped by the new Golf Plus, the re-launched Passat, the Fox subcompact and the facelifted Polo.
A Volkswagen spokesman declined to provide Reuters with half-year figures for the various brands including its core VW marque – the group generally publishes sales figures on a quarterly basis, the report noted.
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By GlobalData“From a short-term perspective, there is a lot priced into the stock, but Volkswagen is going through major changes and that means there is a lot of speculation in the stock,” Pieper reportedly added.
Reuters said the Metzler analyst is reviewing his “buy” rating and €42 price target, saying there is more potential for the shares to gain over the long term.
Reuters said deliveries of the company’s Czech mass market brand Skoda rose 18.7% to 48,300 units last month, the highest figure in its history, though the group’s Spanish mass market brand Seat posted an 8% drop in deliveries to 39,935 units last month. VW brand commercial vehicles reported a 19.5% increase for June deliveries to 33,255 units.
Regionally, Reuters said, the Volkswagen group posted strong growth in markets like South Africa, France and Germany in the first six months but its once-dominant hold on the key Chinese car market continued to crumble.
Despite a 50.2% increase in deliveries to customers in China last month, first-half group deliveries in its biggest foreign market declined by 14.4%, the car maker said.
Volkswagen reportedly confirmed figures given earlier this month from its premium Audi unit that the brand’s deliveries rose by 16.3% to a record 78,700 cars in June.
