The Volkswagen commercial vehicle subsidiary Traton has increased its deliveries thanks to the consolidation of the US truck manufacturer Navistar.

In total, more than 300,000 vehicles were sold for the first time, the company announced on Friday. The growth affected both the truck and bus business. However, the increase of twelve percent to 305,500 vehicles resulted exclusively from the takeover of Navistar: excluding this effect, seven percent fewer vehicles would have been sold.

Traton struggled massively with missing parts in 2022. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, MAN was particularly short of cable harnesses - production was interrupted for weeks due to this, among other things. Traton CEO Christian Levin said that the strained supply chains would not have allowed any more vehicles to be sold - but that the order books were full. However, due to the difficulty in estimating the development of energy and supplier parts costs, the company said it was only accepting new orders on a restrictive basis. Overall, incoming orders fell by seven percent to 334,600 vehicles.

(Report by Christina Amann, edited by Ralf Banser. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at Berlin.Newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or Frankfurt.Newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets)