Anyone who has Varta shares has to be brave

Anyone who has Varta shares in their custody account has to be brave today. Almost nine percent went down on the stock exchange after the battery manufacturer presented business figures. "The pandemic struck last year and everyone bought the new Airpods Pro like crazy. So from a market perspective there wasn't much room for further growth," says Robert-Jan van der Horst, analyst at Warburg Research. Varta has a high market share for headphone batteries; in addition to Apple, the Swabians have also signed long-term contracts with Samsung. In the first half of the year, growth in both sales and profits was somewhat weaker than analysts had expected. Expressed in figures: sales increased by 1.8 percent to almost 398 million euros compared to the same period of the previous year. The bottom line was that profits rose by a good 14 percent to 45.6 million euros. The mainspring for this, however, were household batteries, while the small cells for wireless headphones were less in demand. Varta is particularly strong with lithium-ion button cells for the increasingly popular wireless headphones, but also for hearing aids. However, the group with 4,600 employees has also had household batteries with the brand name Varta in-house since the beginning of 2020. Varta sees opportunities with battery cells for electric cars and wants to enter the business at the end of the year. The construction work for the pilot line for the product with the name V4Drive is on schedule, a first customer order is in place, it said. According to the "Handelsblatt" it is about Porsche.