German luxury sports car maker Porsche posted record annual results Friday on the back of its holding in Europe's biggest car maker Volkswagen but voiced concern about the future as growth slows sharply.
Porsche said its year to July 2008 net profit soared nearly 51 percent to 6.39 billion euros (7.21 billion dollars) as the company booked massive gains on its VW shares.
Porsche said the contribution from various financial transactions involving stock in VW, in which it has built up a 74 percent stake, rose to 6.83 billion euros from 3.59 billion euros the previous year.
The company earned another 1.007 billion euros from its direct stake, which brought the total VW contribution to more than 7.8 billion euros.
Porsche currently owns a direct stake in VW of 42 percent and controls about 32 percent more via stock options.
Porsche total car sales, in contrast, rose only 1.3 percent to 7.46 billion euros.
Pre-tax profit, again buoyed by VW gains, jumped 46.3 percent to 8.57 billion euros.
“Porsche's operative earnings before taxes developed most satisfactorily,” it added.
But Porsche warned again that 2009 will be a tough year and that it will be forced to cut production as sales fall, especially in the key US market.
“Currently we do not assume that we will be able to repeat the high total sales of the previous business year,” it said in a statement.
“It is very difficult to make reliable statements on the course of the current business year as a whole because of the current economic situation which is extremely tense,” Porsche said.
The Stuttgart-based company said it had sold 98,652 of its highly sought after sports cars and sports utility vehicles in past year, up 1.2 percent.
Porsche plans to increase its direct stake in VW to more than 50 percent before the end of the year and as it has bought up stock, the price has seen incredible swings on the Frankfurt stock exchange, rising last week at one point to more than 1,000 euros.
That briefly made VW the biggest company in the world by market value.
On Friday, the shares traded at almost 400 euros, much higher than their intrinsic worth, according to analysts.
Volkswagen revealed in a statement that a director had earned more than a million euros a week ago through the sale of shares in the company.
Production director Jochem Heizmann sold 2,000 VW shares on October 31 at 537.93 euros apiece, a regulatory filing said.
The share price had leapt to 1,005 euros in explosive intraday trading on October 28 as investment funds dived in after previously betting against the stock.
On Friday, Porsche said it would propose a dividend payment of 0.694 euros for each of its own ordinary shares and 0.70 euros for each preferred share, along with a special dividend of 2.0 euros per share for both categories.
