The luxury car brand Audi, the one that reports the highest profits to the giant Volkswagen, has a serious problem due to the shortage of chips for its software systems, something that, strictly speaking, affects the entire industry.
It was confirmed this Monday, October 4, by its CEO, Markus Duesmann, who said that it is the biggest obstacle that Audi must overcome in the remaining months of 2021 and all of 2022.
The CEO of Audi confirmed that they had a “very strong first semester” in the luxury brand, as published Reuters, who spoke with Duesmann in the days leading up to Events Automotive. At that conference, the CEO of the company part of the VW Group will speak of the situation with semiconductors as a “perfect storm” for the automotive industry.
Much of Duesmann’s attention is focused, he said, on the complications unleashed by shortages of key inputs for all car models currently made in the world.
Regarding the revenues and profits of the car brands, the CEO of Audi acknowledged that although sales fell, there are higher margins, which allows us to think about a better horizon.
Audi said in July that the brand failed to make an average five-digit number of cars in the first half of 2021, but the profit margin in the period increased by 10 percent, a mark even better than the 8.1 percent of 2019, before the arrival of the coronavirus crisis.
VW, with Audi as one of the key players, is trying to dethrone Tesla and become the biggest seller of electric vehicles on the planet. Today, Volkswagen is the second largest automaker in the world and seeks to develop software that, according to CEO Herbert Diess, will be a revolution in the industry.
Volkswagen is one of the few brands that hopes to develop most of the automotive software necessary for the transformation, unlike others that rely on partnerships.
On the other hand, they asked Duesmann again what Audi will do with the luxury brands that remained under the umbrella of the German company: Lamborghini, Ducati and Bentley.
In this sense, the CEO of Audi reconfirmed the marketing strategy: there will be no brand killing not a sale of these luxury brands.
Duesmann played down speculation that they could be sold. “These luxury brands are very valuable and very profitable for VW and Audi, and we even think about expanding the level of synergy in the future,” he said. “There is no plan to get rid of them.”