German auto giant Volkswagen AG on Friday said it raced back into the black last year as car sales hit an all-time high, in the latest sign of its “dieselgate” scandal fading into the rear-view mirror.
However, the costly fallout from the emissions cheating crisis also prompted the firm to announce a cap on executive earnings, in a major departure from Volkswagen’s notoriously generous pay packages.
Under the new rules, payouts are to be more closely linked to the group’s financial performance with the chief executive’s remuneration limited to 10 million euros (US$10.6 million).
Other board members will see their annual pay capped at 5.5 million euros, VW said after a meeting of the supervisory board at its Wolfsburg, Germany, headquarters.
The changes come as VW aims to clean up its image after it admitted 18 months ago to having installed software in 11 million diesel engines worldwide that could dupe emissions tests.
In a sign that the tide is turning, the automaker reported a net profit of 5.1 billion euros last year, recovering from a stinging 1.6 billion euro loss in the aftermath of the cheating revelations in 2015.
“While the past fiscal year posed major challenges for us, despite the crisis the group’s operating business gave its best-ever performance,” chief executive Matthias Mueller said in a statement.
The VW group — which includes the brands Porsche, Audi and Skoda — beat analyst expectations with record revenues of 217.3 billion euros last year, up about 2 percent on a year earlier.
Underlying or operating profit rose to 7.1 billion euros, from a loss of 4.06 billion in 2015, it said.
Despite the damage to its reputation because of dieselgate, the group delivered a record 10.3 million vehicles last year, driven by strong demand in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
The result meant VW overtook rival Toyota Motor Corp to become the world’s top selling automaker.
For last year, the group said it planned to raise dividend payouts from 0.11 euros to 2 euros for ordinary shareholders, and from 0.17 euros to 2.06 euros for preferred shareholders.
Looking ahead, VW said it expected the upward trend to continue this year, penciling in a 4 percent rise in revenues while car sales look set to increase “moderately.”
“As the figures show, Volkswagen is very solidly positioned in both operational and financial terms. This makes us optimistic about the future,” Mueller said.
To help it turn the page on dieselgate, VW has embarked on a massive revamp.
It plans to slim down by shedding about 30,000 jobs by 2020 as well as shifting its focus to new, cleaner technologies such as self-driving and electric cars.
The group has committed to paying out more than US$22 billion in fines and compensation to drivers, dealers and authorities in the US, but it has not offered any compensation to affected European drivers.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS