Swedish truck maker Volvo is cautiously optimistic that an upturn is underway in the ailing North American truck market and thinks that the downturn in Europe is less severe than feared, according to the Financial Times (FT).


Volvo chief executive Leif Johansson told the FT: “We have seen an upturn in orders for both heavy trucks and construction equipment in North America in the last few weeks. It’s a matter of a few percentage points.”


The FT said that the North American heavy truck market has been a disaster for truck makers in the last two years after peaking at 309,000 deliveries in 1999 and collapsing to 170,000 deliveries last year. Volvo’s North American sales slumped 34 percent last year, the newspaper added.


Johansson told the FT it was too early to say whether the upturn would prove durable. “This is not booming. This is bottoming out and perhaps slightly increasing,” he said. However, observers told the FT that the comments were more optimistic than those given at Volvo’s capital markets day last month.


There was also cause for some optimism in Europe, Johansson told the FT. “Europe is still coming down, but it is not coming down so dramatically as we expected.”

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Analysts expect the European heavy truck market to shrink by 10-15 per cent this year, the FT added.