Volkswagen's Sales in China Fell 14% in 2021 -- Update
January 11 2022 - 1:26AM
Dow Jones News
By Yoko Kubota
BEIJING--Volkswagen AG sold about 3.3 million vehicles in China
in 2021, down 14%, after it was hit by the global semiconductor
shortage, its China chief executive said Tuesday.
The German auto maker aims to raise sales in the world's biggest
auto market by about 15% in 2022 if component-supply conditions
improve, said Stephan Wöllenstein, CEO of Volkswagen Group
China.
Volkswagen, like other global car makers, has been grappling
with a shortage of chips over the past year. The company has also
been struck recently by relatively small outbreaks of Covid-19 in
China, Mr. Wöllenstein said.
Volkswagen's plant in Tianjin, a port city in northern China
where the country's first cases of domestic transmission of the
Omicron variant were detected in recent days, has recently shut
because of the outbreak, he said. The Tianjin plant is run together
with state-run FAW Group Corp.
In December, Volkswagen also shut down a plant in Ningbo,
another port city in eastern China, after another small Covid-19
outbreak, Mr. Wöllenstein said. Volkswagen operates the Ningbo
plant with state-run SAIC Motor Corp.
"It is really a complex system of constraints which is changing
more or less on a weekly basis," Mr. Wöllenstein said of the auto
maker's production plans. He said that in most recent cases,
Chinese authorities have brought local outbreaks under control in a
few weeks, allowing businesses such as Volkswagen to return to
operations.
Write to Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 11, 2022 01:11 ET (06:11 GMT)
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