Audi must really be racking up a lot of sales lately in order to come out with a statement that it expects its fourth-quarter operating profit will exceed the 348 million euros ($515.8 million) earned in the third quarter. Audi’s Axel Strotbek, the finance chief of Volkswagen AG’s premium Audi brand, expects “an earnings performance that is higher than that of the third quarter.” What’s being implied is that there is a full-year operating profit of more than 1.52 billion euros versus the 2.77 billion it earned in 2008. For the first nine months, Audi’s pretax profit was 1.4 billion euros, resulting to a margin of 6.5 percent. The entire Volkswagen group had posted nine-month earnings before tax of only 1.07 billion euros, meaning that without Audi, it would have posted a pretax loss.
