Porsche Raises Full-Year Forecast Amid Strong Sales, Car Deliveries

[Loren]

from Wall Street Journal

Porsche Raises Full-Year Forecast Amid Strong Sales, Car Deliveries

By CHRISTOPH RAUWALD and KLAUS BRUNE

June 26, 2007 7:47 a.m.

STUTTGART, Germany -- Porsche AG Tuesday raised its full-year profit forecast, saying it is confident pretax profit for fiscal 2007 will be significantly better than a year earlier given strong sales and car deliveries in the first 10 months of the current fiscal year.

Porsche said the pretax profit figure for the full year ending July 31 will be boosted by special factors, including proceeds from share-price hedging related to the acquisition of further shares in Volkswagen AG and the revaluation of its Volkswagen stake, which alone amounts to €520 million ($699.3 million).

Porsche didn't provide any update on its pretax profit after 10 months. In March, after six months of its fiscal year, the sports car maker said pretax profit rose to €1.59 billion, up from €277.8 million. Porsche had said it expected fiscal 2007 pretax profit to "surpass" last year's €2.1 billion figure.

In the first 10 months, Porsche said it kept revenues and car deliveries to customers at "the very high level" achieved in the previous year. Revenues stood at €5.98 billion so far this year, slightly exceeding the €5.96 billion reached in the first ten months of fiscal 2006.

Car deliveries came in at around 79,540 vehicles, slightly lower than the 79,564 cars sold a year earlier. Cayenne sales fell 10.7% to 25,436 vehicles in the 10 months until the end of May. Cayenne sales had been down 41% after six months. Porsche Chief Executive Wendelin Wiedeking said in March that global Cayenne sales for the full fiscal year, which ends July 31, are expected to come in near last year's level of 34,134 vehicles. Total sales for 2006 were 96,794.

Demand for Porsche's high-margin 911 sports car model rose 12.2% to 31,287 vehicles. The company posted Boxster sales of 22,806 cars, "only slightly below" the year earlier figure, Porsche said.