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Comment by verteu | Hacker News Reader

Are VW's shareholders actually doing well?

It seems Volkswagen stock is down -16.23% last-5-years, and trading at a price-to-book ratio of 0.39.

I'm not an accountant, but with such a low P/B ratio, is there a chance the company gets bought out and liquidated for its assets, costing everyone's jobs?

For comparison: Ford trades at price-to-book ratio of 1.13 and is up 16.62% last-5-years (still not much better than the risk-free rate). And long-term TSLA shareholders, of course, have made incredible profits.

https://ycharts.com/companies/VLKAF/price_to_book_value

https://ycharts.com/companies/F/price_to_book_value

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> is there a chance the company gets bought out and liquidated for its assets

Not really. Its partially state owned and considering the influence of the unions and the government nobody could really buy it (especially not to liquidate it).

The valuation is not great, but they are still reasonably profitable also it pays a 5-7% dividend which is quite decent (and I think if its taken into account the return over the last 5 years was positive if still not great).

VW's problem is the EU: the EU decided (corruption? incompetence? both?) to hand over the EU market to non-EU companies, like the chinese ones.

They way they did that was to come up with the craziest green agenda ever: no more sales of ICE vehicles in the EU by... 2035. They decided that a few years ago and this was the beginning of the end for all the EU car manufacturers.

There's no way the EU car manufacturers can be competitive with Tesla on one hand (better batteries) or the chinese (way, way, way cheaper vehicles) by 2035.

So EU politicians, in their usual idiocy, decided to destroy the economy of the biggest country in the EU, Germany.

Seeing this as an EU citizen makes me sick.

I understand that it's great to take ESG postures but... At the cost of destroying your entire economy? All the while the EU is a measly 400 million people and there are billions of people in, say, China and India who don't give a fuck about destroying the planet.

Insanity. 2035 was way too early: this left no time to german car manufacturers. A sad state of affair.

"EU politicians" don't exist. The EU agenda is set by national governments in the Council - including the German one, which happens to have produced important Commissioners like the current Commission President.

The woes of VW have little to do with the green agenda (the electric switch is a reality worldwide), and more to do with a brand tarnished by the emission scandal and the whiff of corruption emanated by the (lack of real) consequences in Germany - because the German government largely looked the other way.

Yes, EU decided to hand over their markets to China even though Mercedes and Audi sell more cars in China than all of Europe combined.

There is literally no connection between stock price and value to labor and customers from the activities of the business

VW would be better off as a worker owned cooperative and have no stock price

There was a time before the stock market created the mechanism to decouple labor from production

The plan now is to create the inverted stock market - returning capital to its rightful owner

It bears repeating that Tesla isn't in the same category: their main value is in their stock price, not stamped metal and batteries, or even the knowledge in assembling those into vehicles.

>Tesla isn't in the same category: their main value is in their stock price,

So it's like Bitcoin. It's worth a lot because a lot of people believe it's worth a lot.

This is true for any stock. The difference between speculation and investment is what drives that belief in future worth of the assest.

That would make Tesla's value more speculation than investment.

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