Volkswagen wants to continue expanding its commitment to electric mobility, and plans to do so with a new million-dollar investment for the next five years. The German company has announced that will allocate 180,000 million euros (about 193,000 million dollars) between 2023 and 2027 which will be used, among other things, for “electrification and digitization”.
Specifically, a 68% of those 180,000 million euros (about 122,400 million euros) will be intended to increase the commitment to electric vehicles. It is a considerably higher figure than the one that the company announced in its last five-year plan, where they allocated 56% of the total investment, which was 124,000 million euros, in “electrification and digitization”.
In addition to using part of the money for combustion vehicles, Volkswagen will use another 15,000 million euros for the construction of battery cell factories under the PowerCo brand. The company expects that in 2030 the annual sales of this division will reach more than 20,000 million euros.
Volkswagen says it can continue to invest in electric vehicles despite “challenging economic environment”
The million-dollar investment for the next 5 years comes after 2022 in which Volkswagen’s operating profit reached 22,500 million euros, 13% more than in 2021. The company’s delivery of electric vehicles has also increased by up to 26%thanks in part to markets like China, where 68% of all vehicle deliveries have been electric models.
Despite these good numbers, Volkswagen sales have fallen by 7% compared to 2021, with a total of 8.3 million vehicles sold last year.
Arno Antlitz, the company’s chief financial and operations officer, highlights CNBC that, even so, and despite the “challenging economic environment”, The company is in a stable financial situation that allows it to “continue investing in electrification and digitization.”“The 2023 financial year will be no less difficult in view of the general economic evolution. However, the strength of our brands, with a convincing product offer and an order book of around 1.8 million vehicles, allows us to face the 2023 financial year with confidence”, he detailed.