Automaker Volkswagen AG said Friday that its first quarter sales slipped 11.4 percent from last year, with declines in the United States offset somewhat by growth in Germany, Russia and China.

The Wolfsburg-based company, Europe’s biggest in terms of sales, said it sold 1.39 million cars worldwide in the January-March period compared with 1.57 million a year earlier. The drop was led by the VW brand, which saw sales slip nearly 5 percent to 876,000 compared with 920,200 in the first three months of 2008.
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China’s auto sales hit a monthly record of 1.11 million vehicles in March, exceeding U.S. sales for the third month in a row, as tax cuts and rebates for small car purchases lured buyers back into showrooms, according to industry figures.

The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said sales rose 5 percent in March from a year earlier, when sales totaled 1.06 million, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Thursday.

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Daimler AG executives may have thought they had escaped the brutal economics of the mainstream auto market when they got rid of Chrysler in the summer of 2007.

But a little over a year later, Daimler and other luxury carmakers are struggling in a downturn that has buffeted the fanciest nameplates as severely as the rest of the industry.
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