Sales have fallen, the Munich rival BMW has taken over the premium crown, but sales of electric cars are increasing rapidly.

On Friday, Mercedes-Benz presented a mixed sales balance for the past year.

The auto division of the Daimler group sold a total of 2.05 million Mercedes cars, a decrease of 5 percent compared to the previous year.

BMW announced sales of 2.2 million cars this week.

For the first time since 2015, Mercedes is no longer the top-selling premium manufacturer.

Gustav Theile

Editor in business.

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The third and fourth quarters in particular were unpleasant for Mercedes: In the three months from October to December, the company sold a quarter fewer cars with the Mercedes star than in the same period of the previous year.

In the three months from July to September, sales even fell by 30 percent.

The current decline is in line with the forecast, said the company.

The share turned into the red with the announcement of the numbers.

The lack of semiconductors continues to inhibit

The company cites the shortage of semiconductors as the reason. This means that many car manufacturers have to shut down entire plants again and again. Nevertheless, demand continues to be high in all segments and regions. Despite the shortage of chips, Mercedes-Benz is making high profits and is paying its employees a bonus of up to 6,000 euros for the past year.

The result, which at first glance appears contradicting, is mainly achieved by the fact that high-margin markets and models are preferentially supplied.

It is part of the Group's strategy to focus less on sales and more on margin.

This is also clearly evident in the sales figures: while a fifth fewer Mercedes cars were sold in Germany last year, sales in China only fell by 2 percent, and in the USA they even increased by 0.4 percent.

In total, almost every second Mercedes-Benz car was sold in the Asia and Pacific region last year, with almost 760,000 around 37 percent in China.

This made China much more important for Mercedes last year than all of Europe, where 696,000 cars were sold.

Electric cars are preferred

Because Mercedes-Benz also prefers its electric cars when it comes to allocating semiconductors, sales increased significantly.

Including the plug-in hybrids, 230,000 electric cars were sold, that is around every ninth car.

This corresponds to an increase of almost 70 percent.

Cars from the all-electric EQ series were sold almost 50,000 times, an increase of more than 150 percent.

The series, which is considered to be strategically important, has so far made up a good 2 percent of all Mercedes-Benz deliveries.

In addition to electric cars, the group prefers to build its semiconductors into particularly expensive cars.

Of the combustion S-Class alone, 87,000 more units (an increase of 40 percent) were sold than of all EQ cars combined.

The high-powered AMG brand sold 17 percent more, the Maybach luxury sedans increased by 50 percent.

The company also presented figures for the Smart brand and the commercial models from Mercedes-Benz Vans.

Smart sales fell by almost three-tenths in the last quarter and remained constant year-on-year.

The sales figures for vans rose slightly by 2.6 percent year-on-year.