U.S. slowdown weighs on Daimler Trucks

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - An economic slowdown is weighing on U.S. demand for heavy trucks, even though big customers have no trouble financing purchases despite the credit crunch, the head of Daimler AG's (DAIGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) industry-leading trucks business said on Monday.

But Andreas Renschler told the Reuters Autos Summit in Frankfurt that he was sticking to his forecast of a U.S. market rebound by the second quarter of 2008.

"(U.S. arm) Freightliner overall makes with 25 customers 55 percent of their volume. They can finance themselves because they are big companies, so we don't see an impact on the finance side," Renschler said when asked about credit market fallout.

"What we see is this kind of issue they have -- the housing bubble or whatever you call it -- has a negative impact on the economic situation overall, and this has led to the market not recovering as fast as we had thought," he added.

"If you look to construction that is going on in the United States, the construction business is very low, and they are also depending on trucks," he said.

New emissions regulations that pulled forward U.S. truck demand into 2006 have also helped push the U.S. heavy truck market down by 40 percent this year. But new U.S. clean-air rules that take effect in 2010 will also give the market a boost in 2009.

Daimler recently pushed back the expected timetable for a U.S. market recovery and now sees it happening early in the second quarter.

Renschler reiterated that he expected the U.S. heavy truck market to start 2008 off weak, then pick up momentum as the year goes on. Demand in Europe should be "more or less the same", he said, while the Japanese market "has the potential to stay stable".

On other subjects, Renschler said Daimler's U.S. truckmaking operations provided a natural hedge to the dollar's weakness against the euro.

Cost savings from using common components across product ranges parts will double in the next couple of years from the 300 million euros ($439 million) it has already saved, he said.

This did not include savings from rolling out a new generation of common engines that will generate huge economies of scale, he said.

Record oil prices were focusing customer attention on fuel, which typically makes up 30-45 percent of truck operators' operating costs, he said, but added Daimler was "very well positioned" thanks to BlueTec technology that can cut fuel use by as much as 7 percent.

(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)

(Reporting by Michael Shields, editing by Will Waterman)