Montag, 4. Mai 2009

Singin' the Trucking Blues


It's not a good time to be a maker of trucks and ship engines when transport volumes decline sharply and financing evaporates.

MAN is the world's third-largest maker of trucks (behind Daimler-Benz and Volvo), and its Q1 results show how the industry is suffering:

Orders have increased a bit from a catastrophic Q4, but compared to Q1 last year, they are still rather sobering:

- Total orders are down 53 % (domestic -46 %, international -55 %)

- Orders for busses (-18 %) and turbines (-18 %) were comparatively "stable"

- Ship engines suffered a 38 % drop

- But the real problem is trucks: Orders were down 66 %

Amazingly, MAN still managed to post a small profit. But as they are still working on old orders, revenues were down "only" 27 %, i.e. the full force of the impact has yet to hit their bottom-line.

MAN's outlook: No improvement expected for the immediate future.

By the way, it's amazing how long it took for the extent of the crisis to sink in: By accident, I stumbled over a press article which quotes the head of MAN's trucking unit as saying: "Right now, we can assume that our orders will increase in 2009". Date of the article? September 21, 2008. Just 7 months ago.

2 Kommentare:

  1. half year ago you had to wait 6 month for a new truck.
    Now,it is just 2 week.

    The decline is the net order intake,which consider this "inventory reduction",so the real production impact will be lower,but it is hard to tell the exact numbers,whithout more information about the MAN logistic / production data.

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  2. check this:
    http://bomlat.blogspot.com/2009/05/status-of-truck-industry-based-on-volvo.html
    explanation of the difference between the net order intake and the production.

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