European big car manufacturers are learning how to keep in the black, just, while sales stagnate and the competition ratchets up.
Perhaps the best way to view with equanimity the general chronically low rate of European profitability is to look across the Atlantic and see the haemorrhaging balance sheets of General Motors and Ford.
By these standards, Europeans aren't doing too badly.
But the latest round of financial results for the first half of 2006 point to tough times ahead for France's Peugeot and Italy's Fiat, with questions also troubling investors in Germany's Volkswagen and the other French car maker Renault.
Only German luxury car maker and money making machine BMW can scan the future horizon with confidence, although DaimlerChrysler's Mercedes division seems to have turned the corner, with profit margins accelerating. DaimlerChrysler investors though are nervously looking at Chrysler's prospects in the U.S., with losses promised there in the third quarter.
Like U.S. manufacturers, Europeans have been attempting to cut costs and restructure their often over-manned and inefficient operations, to ward off Japanese and Korean competition, not to mention the threat of higher costs of raw materials. This has also meant a large-scale movement of factories to central and eastern Europe to shake free of high wages in western Europe.
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