When the coronavirus outbreak hit PSA Group’s Chinese joint venture in Wuhan, it was Volkswagen Group that ended up paying the price. Global volumes across all brands owned by the German automaker fell by a quarter in February due to the stringent lockdown imposed by authorities in the group's single largest market.
By comparison, PSA celebrated the best first two months ever financially, enjoying a record order book because of the launches of new models such as the Peugeot 2008 crossover and the Opel/Vauxhall Corsa small car.
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“In January and February the group was running at full speed,” PSA Chief Financial Officer Philippe de Rovira said during an first quarter investor call.
Suddenly years of failure endured by Peugeot, Citroen and near-premium brand DS Automobiles in China proved advantageous as PSA’s miniscule footprint insulated it from the coronavirus shock despite its main assembly plant being located at the epicenter of the outbreak in Hubei province.
After the virus spread to Europe, however, the roles were reversed. VW Group and its German peers are once again best positioned to weather the fallout caused by the pandemic because of their diversified global footprints.
“Things completely changed,” PSA’s de Rovira said, adding that he was instructing the automotive division to conserve enough cash to withstand a “much more brutal crisis” than anticipated.
Industry association ACEA last month forecast European vehicle sales to decline a record 25 percent to 9.6 million this year. The previous low point, reached in 2013 after the 2008-09 global financial crisis led to years of austerity-related declines, was 12.3 million vehicle sales.
China, meanwhile, has bounced back, with total passenger-car volume growing 7 percent in May, the first year-on-year gain in nearly two years.
Europe exposure
Companies such as PSA that are unable to tap into China’s rebound are at greater risk. With 87 percent of its volume last year coming from customers in Europe, PSA’s exposure to the region will take its toll. Through May PSA’s European sales were down 49 percent, according to ACEA data.
Renault is not much better off as more than half of its global vehicle sales come from Europe, where its volume was also down 49 percent after five months. While Fiat Chrysler Automobiles profits from a strong foothold in the U.S. through its Jeep and Ram brands, it is effectively absent from China.
"We are not counting on a recovery in Europe with the same speed we saw in China,” said Stefan Bauknecht, portfolio manager at German asset manager DWS. “While Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler were more affected in the first quarter due to their Chinese operations than their French peers, that will shift in the second, when the meltdown of the European market can be partially offset by China’s V-shaped recovery.”
In April, VW Group’s vehicle sales turned positive in China, while May brought a moderate volume increase over the previous year. This boosted China’s share of VW Group global vehicle sales for the month to 54 percent, up from approximately 40 percent on an annual basis last year.
VW Group China CEO Stephan Woellenstein recently voiced optimism that a strong second half could be led by Audi and the group's new local entry-brand Jetta. His boss was even more bullish. “We are back to pre-corona level and are winning market share,” VW Group CEO Herbert Diess posted on LinkedIn, while also praising Woellenstein’s team for delivering every fifth vehicle sold by the group this year.
Premium preference
To determine how consumer tastes might have shifted during the pandemic, Berylls Strategic Advisors conducted a study in Germany, the U.S. and China in the aftermath of the crisis. It found that despite 40 percent of all buyers planning to spend less on their next purchase, they would still prefer a premium badge.
“Our survey shows that not only do a greater number of Mercedes-Benz owners still plan to buy a new car within the next six months than do owners of other brands, they are also having to contend less with COVID-19 related budget constraints,” Berylls concluded. Premium car buyers in China, meanwhile, were often not even limited financially in their planned expenditure.
The survey results show that the pandemic could further accelerate a shift by consumers toward upscale German brands at the expense of many volume brands. Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi have each taken roughly half a percentage point of European share thus far this year.
Porsche sales boss Detlev von Platen is cautiously confident the rebound in the sport car maker’s volume will extend beyond China to Europe. Even in the UK, where his showrooms only opened again in June, he is seeing customers start to return.
“We saw a clear hit in configurations on our websites in March and part of April, but we are seeing a very strong recovery of the traffic -- not only from the Internet but also now starting with the re-opening of our dealerships. That gives me cause for optimism,” he told Automotive News Europe.
Marcus Korbach, who heads Bugatti sales at exotic car dealership chain Doerr Automobiles via its locations in Frankfurt and Munich, said the lockdown provided no respite for him as he spent much of it on the phone talking to customers who suddenly found themselves with more downtime.
“I don’t think I can ever recall taking quite as many calls as I did during those weeks,” he said, often fielding questions about what kind of value appreciation collectors could expect for the high-priced supercars.
While many premium brands are growing at the expense of volume brands, they are not all having the same level of success, FCA CEO Mike Manley said.
“Maserati, unfortunately, does not have the strength or the reach, the dealer network, that those guys [at Porsche] have, so, they get hit harder and don’t recover quite as quickly because they don’t have that muscle,” he told analysts in May.
Major market variations
A growing economic divide between European neighbors threatens to exacerbate the situation. Wealthier markets in the northern such as Germany have been able to reduce their debt burdens after the subprime mortgage meltdown over a decade ago and now have the financial firepower that countries like Italy do not.
After years of being criticized for its stinginess, Berlin is looking to take advantage of ultra-low borrowing rates to splurge on a fiscal stimulus package. The federal government’s 218 billion euro net new borrowing plans under the latest annual budget passed by parliament obliterates the previous record of 44 billion from 2010 and equates to twice the amount from the past 10 years combined.
Germany’s coronavirus recovery program alone amounts to 120 billion euros and includes a six-month cut in its value-added tax to 16 percent from 19 percent to spur domestic consumption, as well as doubling government incentives for the purchase of full-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
The Ifo institute’s closely watched Business Climate Index, historically a reliable indicator of German gross domestic product, saw a strong recovery in June as a result.
The manufacturing sector in particular views its future prospects as brighter than at any point since the crisis began, even as its current assessment remained at depressed levels. “Never before have expectations risen so strongly,” Ifo stated.
While Germany’s June car sales remained depressed, down 32 percent of the month, as customers held off until the incentives took effect July 1, the country’s automaker association, VDA, forecast that demand would pick up in the second half.
“We expect in the coming months the first gentle recovery, even if we are still miles away from pre-COVID levels,” VDA President Hildegard Mueller said earlier this month. “One signal is domestic incoming orders.”
Those orders fell 46 percent in May versus the same month last year but swung to an 11 percent gain last month compared with June 2019. Germany, however, continues to see a big drop in foreign orders, mainly because of weak demand in many European markets.
Threat to EU stability
By comparison, southern EU countries led by Italy have been on life support as banks struggle with bad loans clogging their balance sheets and disrupting the flow of credit to the private sector.
“The COVID-19 crisis risks leading to a further widening of economic divergences in the EU,” the European Commission warned in its semiannual economic forecast. “Some of the member states hit hardest by the virus are also those with the least policy space to respond. … This could distort the internal market and ultimately threaten the stability of the euro area.”
This has CEOs such as FCA’s Manley worried that his competitiveness in Europe will weaken with the decline in Italian car demand.
“The magnitude of drop in industry sales in Germany was nowhere near the magnitude of drop in Italy, and there is home-country bias in terms of car purchasing,” Manley said during an investor call. “I think the regulators really need to do something to recognize what’s happened and make sure we get back to a level playing field.”
All hopes are pinned on this month’s EU Council summit, where a stimulus package based on the Commission’s proposed 750-billion-euro Next Generation EU is up for debate.
The danger is brands that lose share in a protracted downturn tend not to regain it all back in the ensuing recovery as less competitive automakers thin out their less-profitable models while their dealers switch to other brands or exit the new car business entirely.
This could cause a repeat of the market shift following the global financial crisis. In 2007, one year before the crisis, Volkswagen Group, Daimler and BMW Group had a 30.3 percent share of European vehicle sales while PSA, Renault Group and FCA’s combined share was 29.3 percent. By 2013, the German brands’ share had grown to 37.1 percent while the French and Italy automakers’ share fell to 25.8 percent.
In the cyclical expansion that followed, PSA, FCA and Renault were able to claw back some of their losses. Yet in the end, the gains were largely cemented in place.
According to the latest European market figures, the Germans now control just shy of 40 percent of the European market while the southern European trio account for a quarter. (To make the figures comparable, volumes from new PSA unit Opel/Vauxhall were excluded.)
Crisis continues
It’s still far too early to close the book on the pandemic. The situation remains highly fluid, with local lockdowns recently imposed in Germany following an outbreak at the country’s largest meatpacking plant and fast-rising infection numbers in the United States, a major market for all European automakers except the French.
In addition, the rebound in China will not protect German assembly line jobs because most of the Mercedes, Audi, and BMW models sold there are locally manufactured. German domestic vehicle production is expected to decline to 3.5 million -- the lowest level since 1981.
Apart from Tesla, German automakers were the only ones investing in new European production capacity to meet demand. Now their plans to expand their footprints have stalled.
First, VW Group said it no longer needs a new factory in Turkey as the collapse in European sales shifted anticipated growth further into the future. Then Daimler announced last week it would initiate talks to sell its Smart plant in Hambach, France, rather than convert it to build even more Mercedes models, citing the new market conditions created by the pandemic.
Timo Klein, principal economist for Western Europe at IHS Markit, emphasized the predicament businesses face, confronted by a crisis with no parallel in modern times.
“We have never had to make this many adjustments to our forecasts in such a short time, but provided there is no second wave, we are currently expecting the German economy to reach pre-COVID output levels in the first quarter of 2022,” he said. “We don’t see that for France until the third quarter of the following year and for Italy not until late 2024 or even thereafter.”
That should bode well for Volkswagen, comparatively at least. For PSA finance chief de Rovira, however, this should be cause for concern. There is one silver lining: Should the French automaker’s pending merger with FCA go through, its singular dependence on the anemic European car market will be much less of a problem.
