Volkswagen exits Euro Stoxx 50 as index removal adds to pressure on troubled firm
Published on
Volkswagen, Europe’s largest automaker, is no longer among the eurozone’s blue chips.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Index provider Stoxx confirmed the change in its annual review at the start of September, and it came into force before trading began on Monday, with Finnish telecoms group Nokia returning to the index and French utility Engie joining.
Dutch information-services group Wolters Kluwer was also dropped.
The removal is mechanical rather than a judgement, as the index is weighted by free-float market value, and Volkswagen’s shrinking valuation no longer cleared the threshold.
However, the consequences are real, as funds that track the benchmark must now sell their Volkswagen holdings, adding to pressure on a stock already under strain. Stellantis suffered the same fate last year.
Volkswagen shares have fallen almost 30% since the start of the year and are down over 6% since last Monday’s open, trading at roughly €76 at the time of writing.
A profit warning to match
The timing could hardly have been worse.
On Friday, Volkswagen flagged around €10 billion in one-off charges and cut its operating margin forecast for 2026 to no more than 1%, down from a previous range of 4% to 5.5%. Analysts had expected 4.1%.
More than €6 billion of the charges stem from a writedown at Porsche, in which Volkswagen holds a 75.4% stake, after the sports car maker lowered its medium-term expectations.
Porsche has been hit hard by American tariffs and weak Chinese demand for foreign luxury brands, and managed a margin of just 1.1% last year.
A further €2 billion or more covers expanded early retirement schemes, impairments in China and the planned sale of Volkswagen Osnabrück GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary and automotive manufacturing plant located in the northwest German city of Osnabrück.
The company warned of “further deterioration in the market environment, especially in China, as well as an accelerated shift in demand in favour of battery-electric vehicles.”
The warning came two weeks after it agreed its largest-ever restructuring, doubling planned job cuts to 100,000 and halving its model line-up.
However, not everyone reads the numbers as a collapse.
Stripping out the one-off items, Volkswagen puts its underlying margin at around 4%, and it kept its cash flow and liquidity forecasts unchanged.
Deutsche Bank, which rates the shares a buy with a €115 price target, said it believes “the headline significantly overstates the deterioration in the underlying business.”
The bank does not expect the pain to end there as it wrote that “additional restructuring charges simply confirm that the transformation process is very expensive and complex […] we expect more to follow over the coming months.”
Volkswagen’s third-quarter results are due on 29 October.
