Volvo Cars is poised to start breaking its annual global sales record again.
"It's an achievable goal as long as there are not any unforeseen developments because of the pandemic," CEO Hakan Samuelsson told Automotive News Europe. "If we avoid any big surprises and things continue to develop as they have so far, we should be able to have a record year in 2021."
The COVID-19 pandemic ended Volvo's six-year streak of record-breaking annual global vehicle sales in 2020. The automaker's current all-time high, set in 2019, is 705,452 worldwide sales.
Volvo targets record-breaking 2021 sales
Samuelsson is optimistic because Volvo had the best second half in its 93-year history, selling 391,751 vehicles worldwide during the final six months of 2020.
It started 2021 by having its best January ever with monthly global sales up 30 percent to 59,588 vehicles on strong demand from Europe (+9 percent), the U.S. (+32 percent) and China (+91 percent, the big rise is because Volvo's January 2020 sales were stunted by the COVID-19 outbreak in the country).
When asked whether 2021 would also be the year that Volvo achieves its long-standing goal of 800,000 global sales, Samuelsson was a bit more cautious.
"We are eyeing continued strong growth and let's see where we land," he said. "Ten years ago we were at about 400,000 cars a year. If you look at our [production] rate in the second half of 2020 we were around that level [nearly 400,000 in a six-month period]. We are about twice the size we were 10 years ago."
