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FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX Broker) - Negative statements by the US investment bank Morgan Stanley on prices, margins and investments in the German automotive industry left their mark on the stock market on Monday. The analysts around Javier Martinez de Olcoz Cerdan lowered their thumbs for the shares of Volkswagen and Porsche AG and advised to underweight them in the investment portfolio. As a result, Volkswagen's preference shares lost 0.7 percent and Porsche AG 1.5 percent.

The experts chose Mercedes-Benz shares as their new favorite in the sector. Here they recommended overweighting the shares in the portfolio. At Mercedes-Benz, negative effects on profitability are already partly included in the share price. However, this only helped it to make short-term gains at the start of the week, with Mercedes-Benz recently falling by 1 percent.

Overall, Morgan Stanley is now more cautious about the automotive sector than before. This is because sales generated with each new vehicle are likely to fall in the future, according to the reasoning. An average decline of four percent is expected for the years 2023 to 2025. Sales prices, product ranges and exchange rates will have a negative impact.

At Volkswagen and Porsche AG, experts consider the market's earnings expectations to be too high. They criticized the dependence on business in China and the limited opportunities to reduce development costs in the face of faster-moving competitors.

BMW shares were also unable to escape the sector weakness and lost 0.7 percent to 95.40 euros. Analyst Javier Martinez de Olcoz Cerdan raised the target price by 8 euros to 108 euros, but left the investment recommendation at "equal weight". The Munich-based company's new models could provide a surprise towards the end of the year, it said./bek/jsl/he

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