Audi confident it can achieve 2008 goals

Audi is optimistic it can achieve its full-year targets for revenue and earnings to rise in line with unit sales as the company is poised to break the 1 million car barrier in 2008.

"We have been surprised in the last few weeks day-by-day by a dramatic downturn in banking systems. End of December we know exactly where we are," Audi Chief Executive Rupert Stadler said on Wednesday at the Reuters Auto Summit in Paris.

"Nevertheless looking at the environment for Audi, I feel quite confident we can reach and achieve this."

In the first nine months through September, sales rose 2.8 percent to 761,500 vehicles.

Stadler said Audi is making money exporting to the U.S. market at current exchange rates, but since he believes the dollar will stabilize between $1.40-$1.50 in the coming years he reaffirmed the company was committed to manufacturing Audis in the United States, with a final decision expected next year.

For the moment, Stadler said Audi was "well hedged" against all major currencies for the next one to two years.

Stadler dismissed media speculation that Porsche SE's two management board members, Wendelin Wiedeking and Holger Haerter, who sit on the Audi supervisory board are intervening in its product strategy in order to prevent competition for their own luxury sports car business. Audi is also in talks with Porsche to supply it diesel engines for the Cayenne SUV, but thanks to a boardroom defeat dealt by VW unions hostile to Wiedeking the group's largest shareholder needs to seek approval before entering into any business with Audi.

"All things are based on win-win situation. We have good business relations with Porsche for years. If there are opportunities we will try to take them and diesel would be a good example," he said.

Audi plans to launch a purely electric vehicle by 2012 at the latest, when the company wants to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent.

This could possibly be a version of its upcoming subcompact that is due to launch at the beginning of 2009 or the start of the next year and which will be built in Brussels.

"The A1 would not be a bad solution. It would fit very well," he said.

-Source: Reuters