Volkswagen’s head of Finance warns that historical restructuring is not enough

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Volkswagen’s historical restructuring is not enough, the company’s main financial manager has warned, citing a “great risk (which) the complacency again” before the largest manufacturer in Europe can transform.

“We have not finished it yet. The actual test we can perform the program and implement it yet has not come,” said financial manager Arno Antlitz Future of the car Summit on Tuesday.

“There is a huge risk that, once a program like this provides the first results, and then the complacency re -enters.”

In December, Volkswagen He reticulated plans to close several German plants after making a fierce resistance to workers, Reaching an unprecedented agreement To halve their production capacity in the country and reduce its workforce by 35,000 until 2030. By the beginning of this month, the company said that it had already reduced its labor force by 7,000.

At the summit, Thomas Schäfer, CEO of the VW company’s badge, echoed the warning, saying that the vehicle company was not where it was still wanted to be. “There is a lot of work to do,” he said.

Volkswagen announced the restructuring program in front of a Expensive transition to electric vehiclesStructurally lower sales in Europe and the fall of market share in China.

The company’s discomfort has caused Germany alarm and more widely throughout Europe, as the challenges of the continent with productivity and energy and labor costs compared to Chinese vehicle manufacturers, who press to expand in the region.

Antlitz also called on Brussels and Berlin politicians implementing structural reforms to promote productivity and flexibility in the labor market, saying that a failure to act now would endanger the success of the recent investments in Germany in defense and infrastructure.

“We have to face not only structural reforms, but also the flexibility of the labor market,” said Antlitz. “If we do not, we risk making these investments that we must make, for example in Germany, in defense and in infrastructure.”

That of the group Quarterly sales From EV to Europe they have doubled more than during the first quarter, with each of the five cars sold in Western Europe now fully electric. However, the increase in car sales aimed at battery also tightened its operational margins, which fell to 3.7 percent of 6 percent of the same period last year.

Schäfer said that the VW brand aimed to reach the parity of costs between electric cars and gasoline vehicles by 2030. “We are not fast enough,” he said.

The profits have also undergone the pressure of the highest rates of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, to the imports of cars made abroad. It is expected that the operating margin of the group will fall to the lower end of its rank by 5.5 percent due to the increase in trade restrictions.