The earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in March had a knock-on effect on the global automotive industry, as many electronics suppliers’ factories were damaged, leading to disruption and parts shortages for carmakers across the globe.
Peugeot, Europe’s second-biggest car maker, said its cars division would take a 300 million euro hit in the second half from the disaster as well as rising costs for raw materials.
Nissan, Japan’s second-biggest car maker, posted an operating profit of 150.37 billion yen (1 billion pounds) for the April-June quarter, down 10.4 percent from a year earlier but better than the average 70 billion yen consensus of eight analysts polled by Thomson Reuters IBES.
Nissan kept its forecasts for operating profit at 460 billion yen and net profit at 270 billion yen for the full year to March 2012.
Peugeot said group recurring operating profit would still be higher than last year’s level for the year as a whole, but the group’s long-term productivity improvement plan, unveiled in 2009, would only partially offset the negative Japan impact.
“We had some room for manoeuvre,” head of strategy and finance Frederic Saint-Geours told a conference call on Wednesday. “Today, that has been reduced by these headwinds.”
While the 2011 figure would still be better than 2010 “we are not defining ‘better,’” Saint-Geours said.
Credit Suisse’s David Arnold said: “Broadly speaking, the numbers are in line for the first half, but no one’s going to care about that; there’s a profit warning in the second half.”
“Daimler numbers are in line, and it has not impacted them to the same extent,” Arnold added.
But the German premium car maker is facing its own headwinds. Second quarter profits were healthy enough but revenues fell short of expectations, raising concerns that demand for luxury cars in Asian markets is starting to cool.
Daimler shares were down 1 percent at 51.32 euros.
At Peugeot revenues were up 9.7 percent in the first half at 31.1 billion euros ($45.01 billion), helped by market share gains outside Europe.
New car sales in the European Union suffered their biggest drop in eight months in June as economic uncertainty prompted caution among consumers and some markets suffered from the withdrawal of state-sponsored scrappage schemes.
Earlier this month PSA said it increased the proportion of cars and light commercial vehicles it sold outside Europe in the first half as it scrambles to boost its presence in fast-growing regions such as China, Latin America and India.
PSA confirmed it expected the European market to remain stable for the full year. It pared its forecast for growth in China, the world’s largest auto market, to around 7 percent, from a previous forecast of 10 percent growth.
It boosted its forecast for the Latin American market to about 6 percent growth from 4 percent and said the Russian market would increase about 30 percent compared with a previous 15 percent forecast.
Saint-Geours said he expected an end to any Japan impact in the autumn.
“On Japan, we have had negative effects, and we continue to have negative effects, because a certain number of components is lacking, which forces us to modify our product offering,” he said.
In the first half, the automobile division’s recurring operating income slipped to 405 million euros from 525 million euros in a year earlier. Excluding the impact of Japan it reached 552 million euros, the company said.
