BERLIN (Reuters) – Volkswagen car brand is struggling to meet its 10 billion euro ($11.14 billion) cost-cutting target, with problems such as low sales and missing parts hampering the group, German business newspaper Handelsblatt reported on Wednesday.

A Volkswagen spokesman declined to comment.

The brand is two to three billion euros short of its savings target for this year, two anonymous sources told Handelsblatt.

The European carmaker, which is the leading carmaker by sales, announced details of planned cost cuts last December, which it hopes will increase the brand’s return on sales from 2.3 percent this year to 6.5 percent by 2026.

The measures the company listed to achieve this goal included reducing the administrative costs of its eponymous brand by a fifth, saving one billion euros by 2028 by shortening product development cycles from 50 to three years, reducing production times and abandoning a planned new €800 million research and development site in its home town of Wolfsburg.

At that time, it was said that savings of up to four billion euros would come into effect in the course of 2024.

Chief Financial Officer Arno Antlitz said at the carmaker’s annual financial conference in August that some measures would need time to take effect.

CEO Oliver Blume told the conference that “costs, costs, costs” would be the focus for the coming years after reporting lower margins for the first half of the year.

(1 US dollar = 0.8976 euros)

(Reporting by Victoria Waldersee; editing by Barbara Lewis)