Volvo Group Trucks announces 29% drop in profits

Volvo Group, the Swedish manufacturer of Volvo Trucks, Renault Trucks, and Mack Trucks, has announced a hefty profit drop for the third quarter of this year. Due to slowing demand in the freight and construction segments, the forecasts for 2025 are also not very optimistic.

Volvo Group earned an adjusted operational profit of 14.1 billion Swedish kronor in Q3 2024 (1.234 billion euros), 29% lower than last year (19.1 billion kronor) and also 10.6% lower than the forecast profits of 15.6 billion kronor (1.635 billion euros).

2025 will not be better

This dip has also caused Volvo to expect no real growth for 2025, with an expected sale of 290,000 units in Europe and 300,000 units in North America, which is on par with the expected full-year sales for 2024. In Q3 2024, Volvo Trucks (not including Mack and Renault) delivered 46,266 trucks, while 43,234 trucks were ordered, a drop of 16% and 8%, respectively.

“We are seeing that freight and construction activity came down in many regions across the world compared with the very high levels of last year,” says Volvo Group SEO Martin Lundstedt in the company’s Q3 press statement.

“Sales of vehicles were 11% lower than last year while sales of services remained resilient and increased by 4%. We continued to generate good profits on the lower sales volumes with a margin of 12.0% thanks to hard work by our colleagues and business partners.” However, this profit margin is still lower than last year when Volvo Group achieved 14.4%.

Are other manufacturers also worse off than in 2023?

Volvo Group is the first large European truck manufacturer to publish its Q3 earnings figures, with Traton (Scania, MAN) and Daimler (Mercedes-Benz Trucks) expected to share their results next week and early November, respectively.

Other manufacturers are expected to experience difficulties, at least compared to the historically fruitful year 2023, which saw the end of supply chain difficulties and the market returning after the lull of the Covid-19 pandemic.