Ferrari despite record orders postpones 2022 targets due to pandemic

Ferrari on Tuesday postponed its 2022 financial targets by a year due to the pandemic despite reporting a record order book, sending shares in the luxury carmaker lower.

“We expect the prudent steps we took in 2020 and are continuing in 2021 to adjust our expenditure in response to the Covid-19 emergency, will postpone by one year the achievement of our year-end 2022 guidance,” Chairman and acting CEO John Elkann said in a statement, presenting the company’s first quarter results.

Shares in Ferrari (NYSE:RACE) fell as much as 6.8% and by 1205 GMT were down 4.4%.

In its plan presented in 2018, the automaker behind the ‘Cavallino Rampante’ or ‘Prancing Horse’ badge guided for adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) to grow between 1.8-2.0 billion euros.

It targeted a margin over adjusted EBITDA of more than 38%.

However, the company said on Tuesday its “excellent” results, a “robust” net order intake and a record order book made it confident it would reach the top end of the forecasts it had set for this year.

In the first quarter, EBITDA rose 19% to 376 million euros ($452 million) versus the 369 million expected by analysts in a Reuters poll.

($1 = 0.8319 euros)