From Reuters:
Report: BMW eyes U.S. sales of 400,000 cars per year
Reuters
January 28, 12:00 CETFRANKFURT (Reuters) -- German premium carmaker BMW aims to increase its sales in the United States to 400,000 units per year in the medium term from 336,000, the German auto motor und sport magazine reported.
"Today Europe is still our main market with a share of around 60 percent followed by North America with 24 percent and Asia with 11 percent," the magazine quoted BMW's head of sales and marketing, Stefan Krause, as saying.
"Looking at countries, the United States with 336,000 units overtook Germany as our main market already a few years ago. And it is there that we see the absolutely strongest growth worldwide," Krause said.
Well, that's a lot of expectation to deal with and I'm not sure the German automakers are reading each others' press releases. If every automaker is going to grow their sales in the US like they say they are, then Americans are going to be buying a lot more cars in the near future than they are today.
Yes, the US market is the world's biggest and is certainly still one of the most dynamic markets where consumers will flock to buy a product that strikes their fancy. But it's also a very mature one and quite saturated already. And the country's economy is teetering on the edge of a precipice called "the R-word" which can stick a pin in all those balloons carrying your rising German brand sales numbers.
I'll leave the last word on this to my colleague Guido Reinking, editor of Automobil Woche in Germany who thinks that German automakers are in denial about the looming US recession.
Is it blissful ignorance, whistling past the graveyard or willful self-deception?
There must be some explanation for the lack of concern, the serenity even, with which German automakers and suppliers view the looming economic crisis in the United States.
It should be clear to all executives involved in the United States that their lofty sales goals border on the nonsensical.
...But at the Detroit auto show this month, executives for BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen were still voicing their projections that the United States could continue absorbing more of their cars each year than in the previous year.
That is yesterday's equation. For the foreseeable future, the sales trajectory will flatten or even turn down. America's economic crisis this time is not likely to bypass the upper classes, those ready buyers of premium German cars, even if they're usually more independent of economic cycles.
As usual, the middle class will be hit hard. Do German executives need to be reminded that the middle class provides the lion's share of demand for VW in the United States as well as the lower-priced models from Mercedes-Benz and BMW?
No, there's no longer much doubt that a U.S. recession is on the way.
