Volkswagen Posts Huge Annual Loss on Small Increase in Revenue

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Volkswagen Posts Huge Annual Loss on Small Increase in Revenue

© Volkswagen AG

The board of Volkswagen was able to say that revenue increased modestly while the company posted a huge loss due to the diesel emissions scandal. It would not seem the problems were bad, based on the board’s assessment:

The Volkswagen Group’s operations developed very robustly in fiscal year 2015 in spite of the emissions issue. Consolidated sales revenue rose by 5.4 percent to EUR 213.3 billion on the back of improvements in the mix in the automotive business and the strong performance of the Financial Service.

Actually, the numbers were not terribly robust. The revenue increased certainly wasn’t and the bottom line has to frighten even VW’s most ardent advocates:

he solid development of sales revenue is not reflected in the relevant earnings figures: the operating result, which had amounted to EUR 12.7 billion in 2014, stood at EUR –4.1 billion in 2015. This figure includes negative special items totaling EUR 16.9 billion. At EUR 12.8 billion, the operating profit before extraordinary charges was slightly higher than the prior-year figure.

[nativounit]
And the performance of VW’s unit sales was also disappointing. Global vehicle sales fell 2% to 10 million.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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