Thyssenkrupp’s Automotive Business Has Passed Trough – CFO

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Thyssenkrupp’s automotive division, which supplies various components to the car sector, reached the trough in its fiscal first quarter that ended in December, Chief Financial Officer Klaus Keysberg said on Thursday.

The German group earlier cited a decline in customer call-offs in the period, caused by an ongoing shortage of crucial semiconductors, as the main driver behind a 65% decline in first-quarter adjusted operating profit at the division.

“We saw huge effects … in our Q1. So we have these call offs which were not stable … But we also said that we consider this Q1 the worst point,” Keysberg told analysts after presenting first-quarter results.

“And what we actually see is that we saw a normalisation on a low level in call-offs from automotive customers. But we think it is going to increase,” he said.

Keysberg said that he expects the semiconductor shortage to continue until the summer, but that the group was observing slightly increasing momentum.

(Reporting by Christoph Steitz, editing by Emma Thomasson)