Both numbers are true. That is what makes this worth explaining rather than simply correcting.
Mercedes-Benz group operating profit rose 22 percent in the second quarter, to 1.55 billion euros from 1.27 billion. Revenue fell 3 percent, to 32.1 billion from 33.2 billion [1]. Shares rose more than 5 percent in Frankfurt.
Profit up, revenue down, in the same quarter, means the gain came from somewhere other than selling more.
Go one line down in the release and you find where.
The Mercedes-Benz Cars division - the passenger-car business, the thing most people mean when they say Mercedes - reported operating profit of 49 million euros. A year ago that line read 783 million [1].
That is a fall of roughly 94 percent, and the release names the cause: 704 million euros of China-related write-downs. Strip those out and the division's adjusted profit was 909 million euros, still down 26 percent [1].
Underneath the accounting sits a market. Chinese car sales fell 30 percent. Europe rose 4 percent and the United States rose 10 percent, and neither was enough [1].
Battery-electric sales rose 51 percent, to 52,852 units, with CEO Ola Kallenius pointing to European BEV order intake 'more than doubling in the quarter' [1]. Fifty-two thousand cars is a real number and a small one against a company that sells in the millions.
The company's own forecast is the tell. Mercedes cut full-year car unit sales guidance to slightly below prior-year levels - a decline it put at between 2 and 7.5 percent [1].
A firm does not guide down 7.5 percent on the back of a recovering quarter.
The 22 percent is not a lie. It is a group number doing work the car business could not do this quarter, and the share move suggests the market read the headline first.
