The parent company of Mercedes-Benz, Daimler, suffered a lot last year from the rising costs of, among other things, tampering with the emission values of diesel engines. The rising costs for the production of electric cars also depressed the result. Profit fell by more than half, the worst performance in recent decades. Daimler warned last month that the legal costs and the recall of cars by the diesel scandal in 2019 to 1.5 billion euros. Daimler also has to spend a lot to prepare its vehicles for new CO2 regulations in the European Union that came into effect early this year. The car fleet currently does not yet meet that. The automaker also speaks of “enormous technical and financial efforts” to design electric vehicle models. To compensate for this, other costs such as those for staff must be reduced. Daimler recently announced about 10,000 layoffs until 2022. Below the line at Daimler last year was around 2.7 billion euros. In 2018, that was a net profit of 7.6 billion euros.
