Porsche pushes back VW takeover as sales tumble

STUTTGART, GERMANY: German luxury auto maker Porsche pushed back its planned takeover of Volkswagen on Wednesday as it revealed that the global slowdown was hitting hard sales of its highly priced sports cars.

"In view of the current economic climate it is more and more unlikely that we will achieve the goal this year" of raising its stake in VW from the current 42.6 percent to over half, Porsche chief Wendelin Wiedeking said.

"Our aim remains to increase our stake to over 50 per cent... as quickly as possible. But we have always said that we would not do anything unreasonable," he told a news conference in southwestern Stuttgart.

Another factor could be the wild swings in VW's share price in recent weeks that resulted from speculation in the run-up to Porsche's takeover.

In late October the price of VW shares shot up to 1,005 euros, making the biggest European carmaker briefly the world's most valuable company by market capitalisation.

Meanwhile, Porsche estimated on Wednesday that its own sales had dropped by 18 per cent to 25,200 vehicles since August compared with the same period a year earlier.

Sales were also expected to have lost 15 per cent to "slightly more than two billion euros" or 2.6 billion dollars, the car maker said.

Porsche now expects full year 2008/2009 sales to be "markedly" lower than the previous year's record of 98,650 vehicles.

On Tuesday, it said that its main assembly line in Zuffenhausen, near Stuttgart, would be shut down for a total of seven days before the end of January.