The commercial vehicle manufacturer Daimler Truck sold more vehicles last year despite bottlenecks in many supplier parts.

Among other things, the company benefited from increasing business in North America. Daimler Truck CEO Martin Daum spoke on Thursday of a strong sales result, which underlined the company's good position in the market. "Despite the challenging overall economic situation in 2022, all our segments were able to further increase sales of trucks and buses."

In total, Daimler Truck delivered almost 520,300 trucks and buses in 2022, 14.2 percent more than a year ago. With almost 186,800 vehicles sold, North America is the largest market and achieved an increase of 15.2 percent for the year as a whole. Daimler Truck is represented in the USA, Canada and Mexico by the Freightliner brand, among others. The Mercedes-Benz brand, which is sold in Europe and Latin America, achieved an increase of 17.7 percent to around 166,400 vehicles, while in Asia, 8.8 percent more trucks were sold to customers with just under 156,000 units. Daimler Truck will present its forecast for the current year on March 10.

The smaller European rival Traton was able to benefit from the takeover of Navistar in the USA and therefore increased its total sales last year by 12.6 percent to 305,500 commercial vehicles sold. Navistar sold 81,900 vehicles - 174.1 percent more than a year ago. By contrast, the other brands fared less well, partly due to the economic headwinds. MAN also felt the effects of the weeks-long production standstill due to a lack of parts following the Russian attack on Ukraine, with sales falling by 9.8 percent to 84,400 vehicles for the year as a whole. The Scandinavian premium brand Scania and the Latin American Volkswagen Truck & Bus had to make do with a drop of 5.7 and 5.9 percent to 85,200 and 54,000 vehicles respectively.

The vehicle industry has recently been struggling not only with shortages of semiconductors, but also of many other parts. When presenting the figures for the third quarter, Daimler Truck CFO Jochen Goetz said that the supply chain had broken down: Many suppliers had not invested in recent years and were now unable to ramp up their production as quickly as necessary. As a result, a large number of parts were missing - from engine components and electronic components to nuts and bolts.

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