FRANKFURT — Volkswagen Group’s first quarter light-vehicle sales dropped 23 percent to 2 million worldwide but the company is hopeful that the Chinese market will recover soon as it moves out of the coronavirus crisis.
China is VW’s single biggest market, accounting for a big chunk of all profits.
Slumping deliveries because of the virus’s spread in China had slowed in April, the head of Volkswagen’s China business Stephan Woellenstein told reporters on a call Friday.
Referring to the country’s light-vehicle market overall, Woellenstein said the decline in sales in April was estimated to be between 15 percent and 20 percent from a year earlier, while the drop in March, at the height of the pandemic, was 40 percent.
“If things continue as they do now, we could have reached last year’s level again in June,” he said. “We see a normalization with view to the summer.”
Volkswagen’s sales were faring slightly better than the overall Chinese market as a whole, he said. But any further recovery hinged on whether Beijing implemented economic relief measures.
Volkswagen’s March global deliveries dropped 37 percent to 623,000.
The drop came after the pandemic triggered plant closures and lower sales as consumers sheltered at home under lockdown measures, and business activity came to a halt, raising fears of a global recession.
In western Europe Volkswagen’s March sales fell 45 percent. In central and eastern Europe they were down 23 percent, in North America they dropped 42 percent in North America and in China they were down 35 percent.
Analysts believe declines in April light-vehicle sales worldwide could be steeper overall, as the full impact of lockdowns work their way through the system and in key regions such as the United States and Europe.
Volkswagen on Thursday withdrew its outlook for 2020 due to the uncertainty related to the virus, which caused operating profit to drop 81 percent in the first quarter.