The global pandemic has been hard on automakers, but fortunately, the industry seems to be rounding the corner as production ramps up and dealers reopen for business. September was a record sales month for Toyota, and the third quarter brought Jaguar Land Rover's first quarterly profit of 2020. Now, Audi has released its financial results for Q3, and the figures suggest the German automaker is making a strong recovery even as the coronavirus outbreak continues.

"In an economically difficult environment, we succeeded in lifting our operating business in the third quarter close to the level of recent years again," said Arno Antlitz, Member of Audi's Board of Management for Finance and Legal Affairs.

The third quarter is where sharp sales spike in Q3 meant that Audi delivered a total of 1,187,190 vehicles worldwide in the first nine months of 2020. This is down12.5 percent compared to the same period last year, when Audi delivered 1,357,102 units worldwide, but a silver lining came from China, where deliveries increased by 4.4 percent.

But zeroing in on the third quarter specifically paints a more optimistic picture. Deliveries actually increased by some 30k units - about six percent - compared to the same period last year. In China alone, deliveries were up 17.8 percent for the quarter, while deliveries in Europe remained at the previous level. Sales in the US "rose from a still-low level."

Overall revenue for the first nine months of the year totaled about $38.8 billion, seeing a 1.7-percent uptick in Q3 versus the same quarter last year - something Audi attributes to strong sales performance for models such as the all-electric Audi e-tron and high demand in China. Operating profit is up to, despite losses through the first half of the year, enabling the German automaker to exceed the breakeven point.

Audi says it is "cautiously optimistic about the rest of the year," but stresses that it's "hardly possible to estimate the impact of the second wave of the corona pandemic reliably."