In the face of the continued sales of new power models such as Tesla Model Y, Li L8 and Wenjie M7, almost all traditional luxury brands are feeling a lot of pressure, especially Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi (BBA), which are the "top three German brands", and they are watching the market being divided. The days of "lying down and earning money" in the past seem to be gone forever.
However, even in the period of transformation of the times, the product base and sales potential of traditional luxury brands should not be underestimated, and BBA, which enjoys a pivotal position in the global market, is not only an important sales growth engine, but also a well-deserved "profit cow". Recently, the three car companies have announced their 2023 financial reports, and after a careful analysis, it is not difficult to feel the strength of the three car companies.
In terms of sales, the BMW Group delivered a total of 2.554 million new cars last year, a year-on-year increase of 6.4%, leading the way again by a slight margin, followed by the Mercedes-Benz Group, which sold 2.4918 million cars and trucks, a year-on-year increase of 1.5%, focusing on the word "stable"; while the Audi Group delivered only about 1.9 million vehicles, but the year-on-year increase of more than 17%, the growth momentum is relatively stronger.
In the eyes of domestic consumers, BBA's new energy models are classified as "miscellaneous cars", but the global performance of the three is enough to refresh this understanding. Among them, the BMW Group delivered 375,000 pure electric models and 565,000 new energy models including PHEVs last year, which is equivalent to the sum of Li and NIO in the same period. Mercedes-Benz and Audi Group sold 240,700 and 178,000 electric models respectively, a year-on-year increase of more than 50%. It can be seen that the pure electric market is certainly a difficult "hard bone", but it is also the driving force to maintain and promote sales growth.
Keep your eyes on revenue and profit. Mercedes-Benz is worthy of being a "big gold absorber", with total revenue of 153.2 billion euros and EBIT of 19.7 billion euros last year, including Mercedes-Maybach, G-Class and Mercedes-AMG, all of which have maintained a stable development momentum. At the same time, R&D spending amounted to 10 billion euros for the full year and free cash flow for the industrial business reached 11.3 billion euros, both at relatively healthy levels.
In addition, the BMW Group's total revenue reached 155.498 billion euros last year, slightly ahead of Mercedes-Benz, and EBIT reached 18.482 billion euros, an increase of 32% year-on-year, but still inferior to the latter. It is worth mentioning that thanks to the increase in equity ratio, BMW Brilliance's revenue was included in the BMW Group for the first time last year, which played a positive role in optimizing the financial statement, and the Group's R&D costs increased by 13.8% to 7.538 billion euros last year, which can also be seen in the BMW Group's firm determination in the new energy track.
In contrast, the Audi Group performed slightly worse, with full-year revenues of 69.9 billion euros, up 13.1 percent year-on-year, and an operating profit of 6.3 billion euros and an operating margin of 9 percent. Similar to Mercedes-Benz and BMW, the Audi Group is also facing the bottleneck of electrification transformation, and how to make e-tron pure electric models establish a consumer perception like the "quattro" in the fuel era also requires time to accumulate and continue to accumulate.
Obviously, even if the domestic auto market has continued to reshuffle in the past two years, for the "luxury three", the solid foundation of the global market can still support the steady development of enterprises. But then again, the new energy market has always been the "heart disease" of traditional luxury brands, and how to make products more trusted by global users, especially in the face of fierce competition in the Chinese market, has become a difficult problem for BBA to overcome in the next few years.