Porsche Achieves garners positive first-half result, re-positions for Motorsport

In the first half of 2017, Porsche AG increased its operating result, revenue, deliveries and number of employees.

Six months into the year, Porsche’s operating result has reached 2.1 billion euro, an increase of 16 per cent. Revenue rose by eight per cent to 11.8 billion euro. The company’s profit margin came to 18.1 per cent (prior half year: 16.8 per cent), while the number of deliveries rose by seven per cent to 126,497 vehicles.

Also, The company’s workforce increased by twelve per cent to 29,280 employees.

Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche AG, Oliver Blume, says: “The priority of Porsche is to have thrilled customers and secure, sustainable jobs. Strong financial results create a solid foundation for the future. Porsche counts on puristic and passionate sports cars – this currently includes the new 911 GTS, the 911 GT3, the 911 Turbo S Exclusive and the 911 GT2 RS – as well as on future technologies such as plug-in hybrids and pure electric mobility.”

Lutz Meschke, Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board and Member of the Executive Board for Finance and IT at Porsche AG, stresses that a long-term currency hedging strategy and efficient organisation with a further optimised cost structure underpin the trend of positive results. However, he speculates that the extremely high result from the first half of the year may well be difficult to sustain in the future. He says: “We will only see a return on our sizeable investment for the development of Porsche’s first purely electric sports car and the expansion of production at the Zuffenhausen site once the Mission E goes on sale at the end of the decade.”

Porsche is investing one billion euro in the Mission E and will create more than 1,200 new jobs. In addition, the sports car manufacturer is spending several hundreds of millions of euro on future technologies and plug-in hybrid drives. “It’s massively challenging”, Meschke continues, “managing a significant sum of investment while sustaining our high level of return at the same time.”

In the current 2017 financial year, Blume and Meschke expect to see a year-end operating result that is slightly above the previous year’s high level, provided that foreign exchange rates remain stable. Furthermore, Porsche will continue to achieve its strategic objective of an operating profit margin of at least 15 per cent.

Meanwhile, a Porsche works team will compete in Formula E. As a result, the company will be ending its involvement in the LMP1 class of the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) at the end of the 2017 season.

Porsche maintains its focus on international GT racing, and will also concentrate its motorsport strategy on using the 911 RSR in the GT class of the FIA World Endurance Championship, the high-light of which is the 24 Hours of Le Mans, as well as the American IMSA Weather-Tech SportsCar Championship and other long-distance classics.

This realignment of motorsport is derived from the direction set out for the company in Porsche Strategy 2025, which would see Porsche develop a combination of pure GT vehicles and fully electric sports cars, such as the first fully battery-powered Mission E road car.