Traton Financial Services, the financial arm of commercial vehicle manufacturer Traton Group, today reported increased revenue despite a slight decline in unit sales for the parent company.
The group’s financial services revenue growth came as the company works to expand into a global financial services entity, Traton Group Chief Executive Christian Levin said during the earnings call.
“Traton Financial Services made enormous progress in ramping up, especially the MAN Financial Services offering in Q4,” he said. “There we implemented financial services businesses in the U.K. and Ireland, completed the big rollout in Germany, and with that, Traton Financial Services delivered, according to the planned geographic expansion for calendar year 2024, with nine out of 14 countries.”
Traton Group aims to continue expanding Traton Financial Services in 2025, Levin said.
“The plan going forward for 2025 is to complete the rollout in all the remaining countries and continued geographic expansion,” he said. “This will enable us to grow our financial services portfolio and provide integrated captive financing to customers across all of our brands and most of our markets.”
BIGGER PICTURE
Traton Group reported stable unit sales despite challenging markets persisting across the globe, Levin said.
“In the U.S., Q4 deliveries were also down year on year in a declining market, but international performed well in the vocational track segment and returned to a healthy level,” he said.
BY THE NUMBERS: Munich-based Traton Group reported the following in fiscal 2024, ended Dec. 31:
- Incoming truck and buse orders landed at 263,575 units, down 0.5% year over year;
- Unit sales were 334,215 units, down 1.2% YoY;
- Truck sales reached 278,130 units, down 1.1% YoY;
- Bus sales finished at 28,413 units, down 6.1% YoY;
- MAN TGE van sales were 27,672 units, up 3.9% YoY;
- BEV unit sales ratio ended at 0.5%, down 0.1 percentage point YoY;
- Sales revenue totaled 47.5 billion euros ($51.4 billion), up 1.3% YoY;
- Traton Financial Services sales revenue landed at $2.1 billion, up 21.6% YoY;
- Traton Financial Services’ customer financing receivables outstandings were $7.9 billion, up 12.4% YoY; and
- Traton Financial Services dealer financing receivables outstandings reached $2.4 billion, up 51.2% YoY.
NOTEWORTHY
Traton Group’s forecast for the truck market depends heavily on anticipated prebuy related to the Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions standards that are set to take effect in 2027. The standards could face challenges under the administration of President Donald Trump.
“We also expect North America truck market to remain weak, depending on the magnitude of the expected EPA27 prebuy and subject to future geopolitical developments in the U.S.,” Levin said. “Demand should develop somewhere in the range from zero to minus 10% also in North America, with back-end loaded development, where we expect the prebuy, if there will be a prebuy, to rather kick in towards the second half of 2025.”
MARKET OUTLOOK: Shares of Traton [OTCPK: TRATF] were down 2.62% or $1.08 from market open today to close at $40.13. The company has a market cap of $20.72 billion.
Editor’s note: All amounts have been converted to U.S. dollars.
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