Porsche denies optimistic earnings per car report

A report released by B&D Forecast revealed that Porsche made more money per car it sold than any other manufacturer. Not only that, it's reported profit of €21,799 per vehicle dwarfed that of second place BMW, which reportedly earns €2,475 per vehicle. When we first heard about this report, we thought something might not be right unless Porsche has been building its cars out of Papier-mâché lately.
Basically, the study just took Porsche's pretax proft in the 2005/2006 fiscal year and divided it by the 96,794 vehicles it sold in 2005. Porsche is rightly arguing that the calculation is misleading because it doesn't take into account the company's one-off gains that year that had nothing to do with building and selling cars. Porsche's participation with VW during this time resulted in adding €203 million to the books and another €80.7 million came from the automaker's sale of CTS Fahrzeug-Dachsysteme. Neither source of extra income came from the result of selling cars, so they shouldn't be included in a profit-per-vehicle calculation.

Honestly, who ever believed that Porsche earns €21,799, more than USD$28,000, on every vehicle it sells? B&D Forecast should give the intern that wasn't sharp enough to catch this error a few good lashings.

Check out Porsche's official release on the matter after the jump.

[Source: Porsche, just-auto.com]

PRESS RELEASE:

One-off and extraordinary effects result in distorted figure
Porsche refutes B&D Forecast profitability calculation

Stuttgart. Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG, Stuttgart, refutes the calculation of the B&D-Forecast forecast institute as unserious. In a study the institute asserts that with each of the 96,794 sports cars Porsche sold in the 2005/2006 financial year, Porsche earned an average of €21,799 Euros. The calculation is misleading because it does not take into account the extensive one-off and extraordinary effects which impacted the pre-tax result of the Porsche Group in the 2005/06 financial year and which have nothing to do with the original Porsche business.

Thus €203 million Euros of the pre-tax result comes from the participation in Volkswagen AG. This figure is largely purely an accounting one, which Porsche must include in its statement of earnings, even though not a single Euro flows to the sports car manufacturer. What is more, income from hedging transactions in connection with the VW participation resulted in a considerable three-figure amount in millions. This equally had just as little with the actual vehicle business. Furthermore, with the disposal of CTS Fahrzeug-Dachsysteme GmbH, the sports car manufacturer realized a book profit of €80.7 million Euros. This amount also cannot be allocated to the vehicle business.

From the Porsche perspective, it is thus not serious to include the above special effects in the calculation basis for profitability per vehicle.