Volkswagen to make another $3.4bn in cost cuts
Vehicle maker seeks to increase the profit margin in its VW brand but has ruled out forced redudancies
Volkswagen announced another €3bn of cost cuts on Thursday in an effort to speed up an improvement in profit margins at its core VW brand. Still battling to recover from a 2015 scandal over emissions test cheating, the German vehicle maker has been cutting costs to fund an ambitious shift to electric cars and automated driving. A key goal is to improve margins at its mass-market VW brand, its largest division by sales, but which has long lagged the profitability of rivals such as Japan’s Toyota, due in part to high labour costs at its German plants. “By 2020 we will achieve €3bn in cost savings, and now aim for a further €3bn by 2023,” Arno Antlitz, the board member responsible for finance at the VW brand, told a press conference in Wolfsburg, Germany. That should help the brand reach a profit margin of at least 6% by 2022, three years earlier than previously planned, the company added. Volkswagen said it aimed to reduce administrative expenses and remove complexity from the brand’s...
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