“Our order book is stellar,” PSA Group CEO Carlos Tavares said on Tuesday when the parent company of Peugeot and Citroën reported its results for the first half of the year.
Tavares’s enthusiasm was justified; The French car giant posted a profit of 595 million euros ($ 697 million) during the period. Analysts had expected to see € 222 million in operating income, but they made € 517 million. Sure, PSA knows the coronavirus pandemic will shrink the market this year, a quarter in Europe and 10% in China, it predicts, but all is not lost.
A similar story is unfolding in Germany, where Daimler CEO Ola Kaellenius last week praised “the first signs of a recovery in sales.” The Mercedes-Benz maker expects this year to be profitable overall. and where the Ifo Institute for Economic Research on Tuesday described the auto industry as “one of the biggest winners” in the country’s cautiously optimistic export sector.
“I don’t see a very fast recovery, but the last two to three weeks have been somewhat more positive than I expected,” Jürgen Pieper, a senior advisor at Metzler Bank, told.
I am definitely seeing the market recovering, but for 2020 I see the market ending with a 20% reduction, said Berlin-based analyst Matthias Schmidt. This is better than most people a few months ago.
Some analysts are not so optimistic.
Ferdinand Dudenhofer, who led automotive analysis at the University of St.Gallen in Switzerland, said only four months ago that the continent’s car factories were closing down due to the COVID-19 attack, which led him to an automotive market for Western European The automaker was expected to take an entire decade to reclaim 2019 sales levels.
You haven’t changed your mind about it; indeed, he expects consumer confidence to be affected by an impending wave of bankruptcies in the travel industry, as well as the tax increases that will be needed to pay off the titanic debts that governments are taking on as they bail out. develop businesses and shore up employment. And then there is the possibility that a second wave of the coronavirus will keep prospective customers out of showrooms.
“We believe that the situation will be very difficult in the next semester and we do not believe that [there will be] a real global recovery,” Dudenhöffer said Tuesday.
Don’t take the bus
First, Pieper proposed, the pandemic could be pushing people toward private transportation. Second, some governments, such as those of France and Germany, have moved to shore up the auto sector by subsidizing the purchase of electric cars. France has also introduced a scrapping scheme to incentivize drivers of fossil fuel cars to ditch them and go electric.
“France was the only market in Europe that rebounded in June,” said Schmidt.
Schmidt also suggested that a combination of a generally depressed car market and electric car incentives would make it easier for European car manufacturers to meet EU-imposed emission targets.
The French and German governments have enthusiastically chosen to support the add-on with generous incentives, be it subsidies or tax incentives, [manufacturers] can now sit back and follow the average emissions of their fleet peacefully with the Finnish Can see while doing. You can navigate the line to avoid others. He said that the prophecy would be the catastrophe caused by a kind of fulfillment.
There are not the same incentives for traditional car purchases, but, as Schmidt pointed out, manufacturers such as Volkswagen are still trying to stimulate demand by covering sales tax on some models for a limited time.
