Porsche SE, the maker of the 911 sports car, said nine-month revenue fell 15 per cent as the recession discouraged drivers from buying Cayenne sport-utility vehicles.
Sales for the period through April 30th declined to €4.64 billion ($6.47 billion) from €5.46 billion a year earlier, Stuttgart, Germany-based Porsche said today in a statement.
The company reiterated that revenue and earnings will fall this fiscal year, based on “extremely poor business” in the first three months of 2009.
The drop in sales will reduce Porsche’s options for paying back more than €9 billion of debt stemming from its purchase of a majority stake in Volkswagen AG, Europe’s biggest carmaker.
Porsche may sell a voting stake of at least 25 per cent to Qatar for as much as €2.5 billion, which would mark the first time in the family-controlled manufacturer’s 78-year history that an external investor owns such a large holding.
“What Porsche said about its operations are what everyone expected, but everything about the current focus of attention - the talks with Qatar, loan negotiations and a possible merger with Volkswagen - they left open,” said Marc-Rene Tonn, an automotive analyst with MM Warburg in Hamburg.
Porsche fell as much as €1.03, or 2.3 per cent, to €43.57 and was down 2 per cent as of 9.07am in Frankfurt trading.
The stock has declined 16 percent this year. Net debt tripled after Porsche increased its stake in Wolfsburg, Germany-based Volkswagen to 50.8 per cent at the beginning of 2009 from 42.6 per cent in October.
Porsche holds options for about 20 per cent of Volkswagen stock following purchases last year in an effort to achieve a 75 per cent stake.
The options, which have helped Porsche’s pretax profit so far in 2009, may hurt earnings should Volkswagen’s stock price “drop” by the July 31st end of the fiscal year, the company said today, without specifying figures.
Volkswagen stock has declined 10 per cent this year. At the same time, write-offs and hidden- reserve settlements on buying Volkswagen stock held back pretax profit by €1.8 billion, Porsche said.
Bloomberg