FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The newly spun-off truckmaker Daimler Truck will prioritise investment in future technologies over boosting its profits if it achieves the two-digit margin it is targeting, CEO Martin Daum said at a roundtable on Friday.
“The fact that we still exist is due to two things: because the company has always made money, and there were hard times in between, and secondly, because we always invested in the future,” Daum said, speaking to journalists hours after the company was listed on Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
CFO Jochen Goetz added that although he hoped the worst of the chip supply chain crisis had passed in the third quarter of this year, uncertainty on the issue would continue to have “serious consequences” for Daimler Truck into 2022.
Daum told German newspaper Automobilwoche last month the company would sell a “mid five-digit number” fewer vehicles than it could have because of lacking chips, resulting in several billion euros in lost revenues.
(Reporting by Ilona Wissenbach, Victoria Waldersee, Editing by Miranda Murray)
