No, that doesn't hurt us at all," said Ola Källenius at the end of January when asked about the fact that Mercedes sold fewer cars than BMW last year.

On the contrary, said the Mercedes-Benz boss in the video conference with journalists, that fits with the luxury strategy.

"Part of luxury is scarcity."

Gustave parts

Business correspondent in Stuttgart.

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Why the Mercedes boss is so relaxed about the sales figures became clear once again on Friday morning when the company surprisingly presented its preliminary financial results for the past year.

The stock market rejoiced: while the Dax lost slightly, the company's shares, which have been trading as the Mercedes-Benz Group since February 1, gained more than 8 percent at the top.

The financial result, which is still preliminary and unaudited, obviously surprised everyone involved: the adjusted EBIT, i.e. profit excluding interest, taxes and one-off effects, was 14 billion euros.

That is 60 percent more than the Daimler Group – i.e. including the truck business, which is now called Daimler Truck and is independent – ​​earned in the previous year.

And it is more than double the 6.8 billion euros that the auto division generated in 2020.

The return developed accordingly.

That was 12.7 percent last year, well above the forecast of 10 to 12 percent and much more than the 6.9 percent the auto division achieved last year.

This marks a successful start for Mercedes-Benz in the period following the separation from the truck business.

Källenius repeatedly emphasizes how important the share price is to him.

He wanted to "raise the company's value potential," he said at the end of January.

The renaming should also contribute to this.

Abroad, Daimler has always been perceived as a Mercedes.

He hopes that attention will now increase for Mercedes as an investment opportunity.

Above all, his goal is for the company to be assessed differently on the stock exchange in the future: that the shareholders rate Mercedes more as a luxury or a tech company than as a boring car manufacturer.

Then the stock has a lot of potential, he said.

Friday's press release emphasizes this strategy: "As the world's most valuable luxury car brand, we are accelerating into an all-electric,

Chips for China

Mercedes has made a virtue of the luxury strategy out of the necessity of the semiconductor shortage.

Like all manufacturers, the group builds the few available computer chips into the cars, which yield a particularly large amount of money.

The fact that 5 percent fewer cars were sold last year is therefore not particularly painful.

Instead, Mercedes can do without discounts, the announcement speaks of “solid net pricing”.

And Mercedes sells significantly more of the really profitable models and brands: Sales of the S-Class increased by 40 percent to 87,000, while the sporty and highly motorized AMG division increased sales by 16.7 percent.

Electronics sales are also growing fast, albeit from a very low level.

And the group even sold 50 percent more of the luxury brand Maybach, a total of almost 16,000.

The Maybach brand also makes it clear how dependent Mercedes is on developments in China.

According to the group, an average of 900 models of the luxury brand were sold there every month last year.

In mathematical terms, almost 70 percent of the very profitable Maybachs went to customers in China.

Because that also follows from the Källenius strategy: more important than mere sales is the return that Mercedes generates in the various regions.

The fact that Mercedes sales in the fourth quarter of 2021 fell the least of all regions in China shows that the return there should be right.

So the few chips are more likely to end up in cars that are sold in China.

The car manufacturer currently belongs to almost a fifth of Chinese.

The Baic group, which is backed by the Communist Party of the capital Beijing, and the billionaire Li Shufu, who built the Geely car company, each hold almost 10 percent.

There is speculation that Baic could want to join the Mercedes supervisory board this year.

But then Li Shufu could also claim a place, it was said at the end of last year.

According to FAZ information, Shufu is currently no longer interested in it.