It might be March now, but think back to January for a moment. That's when Ducati announced its FY 2025 financial results and noted only a slight dip in sales for 2025 as compared to 2024. To be fair, 2025 was a challenging time both in the motorcycle industry and elsewhere, and you'd truly have to have your head stuck in a hole in the ground to not be aware that's the case.
Fast-forward to the present, and Ducati's parent company, Volkswagen Group, has just announced its own FY2025 annual report results for all segments of the company. Besides the titular automotive company and Ducati, the Volkswagen Group also owns Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porsche, Škoda, and SEAT/Cupra, in addition to its Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles division. As you'll note, Ducati is the only non-carmaker on the list.
Looking through the Group's annual report, the company consolidates its holdings into a few different buckets. What it refers to as its Core Brand Group consists of VW Passenger Cars, Škoda, SEAT/CUPRA, VW Commercial Vehicles, and Tech Components.
Adding all those together, it shows modest sales growth for the Core Brand Group for 2025, both in terms of the total number of vehicles sold and the sales revenue. In 2024, the Core Brand Group reported total vehicle sales of 4,960,000, while that number rose to 5,125,000 in 2025. Likewise, sales revenue was a reported € 140,004,000 in 2024, while it rose to € 145,202,000 in 2025. The Core Group's operating result for 2025 was very slightly lower than for 2024, at € 6,821,000 in 2025 compared to € 6,961,000 in 2024.
If you're wondering where VW Group slots Ducati into its overall group reporting, since it's the only motorbike manufacturer, here's your answer: It's in the Progressive Brand Group, alongside Audi, Bentley, and Lamborghini. Because it groups things in this way, overall unit sales remained steady from 2024 to 2025, totaling a reported 1.1M total vehicle sales in both years.
As we reported in January, Ducati reported sales of 50,895 total motorcycles in 2025, as compared to the 54,495 it sold in 2024. Italy remains Ducati's strongest market, while the US still remains in second place. Interestingly, despite trying economic times, Ducati reported a 4% sales increase in the US in 2025, selling 7,268 total motorcycles across our region. By contrast, Italy's sales were down 8% year-on-year, with 8,803 motorcycles sold. Germany holds down the third-place slot, with sales down 12% YoY, having sold 5,759 motorcycles throughout the year.
We're Tiptoeing Around The Elephant In The Room
If everything's pretty chill across most of the brands in Volkswagen Group's portfolio for FY2025, then why are financial headlines around the world blaring about its worst results in the past decade? And more importantly, why has the VW Group announced alarming plans to lay off 50,000 employees in Germany by 2030?
You may have noticed that there's one name in the group's brands that we haven't talked about yet, and that's Porsche. If you did notice that already, then please give yourself a pat on the back and go get a cookie. You deserve it.
See, when you're the owner of a large group of different brands, you can categorize them however you want for reporting purposes (as long as you label things clearly). For example, that's how you end up with LiveWire and StaCyc balance bikes being categorized together, if you're Harley-Davidson.
In VW Group's case, for financial reporting purposes, it's siloed Porsche off on its own into what it calls the Sport Luxury brand group. What other brands are in this segment? None, but that's not the point. Overall, in 2025, 266,000 Porsche vehicles were sold, as compared to the 313,000 sold in 2024. Sales revenues were down slightly, at € 32.2 billion versus the € 36.4 billion it reported for 2024.
However, on paper, the storied sport luxury German automotive brand reported a stunning operating profit loss of 98%, going from € 5.3 billion in 2024 to just € 90 million.
How did this happen? In large part, it's because Porsche had invested significant resources in a completely new, all-EV platform that it has now abandoned. Since it had already been working toward this now-abandoned platform for years, reporting the loss of those sunk costs all at once made a significant dent in both the brand's and its parent company's reported numbers. And since Porsche has historically been the brand within the Group with the fattest profit margins (double-digits until now, even!), it's a significant hit for VW Group to absorb.
Why did it reverse course? Continuing challenges in China, US tariffs, and, of course, the ever-popular "higher materials costs." Instead of pursuing that full-electric platform, Porsche plans to work on the development and refinement of combustion engine vehicles and plug-in-hybrids. And also, apparently, 50,000 employees of the Group in Germany are going to lose their jobs over the next four years.
Since the Group specified that these layoffs would occur in Germany and not elsewhere, this specific thing doesn't appear to affect Ducati directly. Still, it's worth keeping an eye on what transpires next, as it's the one outlier property in a group comprised primarily of automotive brands, and it isn't an island.
