FRANKFURT — Volkswagen boss Herbert Diess mentioned Europe’s prime automobilemaker was in “disaster mode” over an ongoing lack of badly wanted automotive chips, including the influence of the scarcity would intensify and hit income within the second quarter.
Talking after bumper outcomes for the primary three months of the 12 months, throughout which working income elevated greater than 5 fold, Diess mentioned the bottleneck would “considerably burden earnings” within the quarter to June.
The scarcity has been attributable to a mixture of components, together with the automobile business’s sharper than anticipated rebound from the coronavirus disaster and a hearth at key automotive chip maker Renesas Electronics Corp.
Snowstorms in Texas earlier this 12 months have made the state of affairs worse, hurting native manufacturing of chipmakers equivalent to Samsung Electronics, Infineon and NXP Semiconductors.
“We’ll do every little thing to offset a big quantity of the misplaced automobiles within the second half of the 12 months,” Diess advised journalists. “However the incidents within the U.S. and in Japan will damage us positively.”
Diess mentioned whereas the issue had reduce manufacturing by round 100,000 automobiles within the first quarter, there was extra to come back.
“We’re nonetheless tasking our provide chain folks to get better the losses of quarter two, which we anticipate,” he mentioned.
Volkswagen shares have been down 2.8%.
To safe provides over the longer-term, the German group is speaking on to chipmakers together with NXP Semiconductors and Infineon, in addition to foundries equivalent to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, Diess mentioned.
“We’re, for certain, in disaster mode,” he mentioned.
Regardless of the crunch, Volkswagen raised its working margin goal for this 12 months after sturdy demand for Audis and Porsches within the first quarter.
It now expects an working revenue margin of 5.5-7%, up from a earlier forecast of 5.0-6.5%.
Through the first quarter, deliveries of Porsches and Audis each rose by a couple of third 12 months on 12 months, Volkswagen has mentioned. Gross sales of electrical autos greater than doubled to 133,300 autos.
Stronger demand for high-margin automobiles echoed comparable feedback from Normal Motors, Daimler, Ford and Stellantis.
Volkswagen, the world’s second largest automobilemaker by automobile gross sales, cheered traders earlier this 12 months when it offered extra element about its electrical automobile technique, together with greater gross sales targets and plans to construct six battery factories in Europe.
Volkswagen’s working revenue got here in at 4.8 billion euros ($5.8 billion) in January-March, helped by value cuts and better gross sales, versus 900 million euros in the identical interval final 12 months, which was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
