Volkswagen AG, Europe's biggest carmaker, expect no rise in car sales in 2005 in Europe as a whole nor in its home German market, VW executives were quoted as saying on Saturday.
"We don't get the feeling there will be a recovery when in almost all the biggest European countries people are worried about the future and are thinking about putting money away for their pensions," VW Chairman Bernd Pischetsrieder told Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore in an interview.
"Therefore next year, the European auto market will remain more or less at the same level as in 2004," he said. VW management board member Martin Winterkorn echoed that message in an interview with daily Berliner Zeitung.
"I don't believe that there will be notable growth in car sales in Germany in 2005," he said.
"We have to generally prepare for lower growth rates in western Europe. The biggest chances for German producers are to be found in exports," he said.
Volkswagen, suffering from declining popularity of its cars in key markets such as Germany, the United States and China, revealed on Friday that it was hit by a decline of more than a quarter in US car sales in September.
VW's September sales dropped to 20,872 vehicles from 27,904 in the year-ago month, while US sales in the first nine months of 2004 fell 16 percent from last year to 195,530 vehicles.
There would probably be an improvement in 2005 thanks to the new Passat and Jetta cars "although it will be very difficult to return to profit as soon as 2005," Pischetsrieder was quoted as saying, reiterating previous comments about the US outlook.
"I am very confident that we will find creative solutions because there are reasonable people on both sides of the table."
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