BMW's Mini brand aims to grow next year in albeit deteriorating market conditions, which spoiled Volkswagen's Skoda brand growth plans, magazine auto motor und sport said on Saturday. "We will continue to raise sales in 2009 regardless of the global sales crisis," Mini marketing director Wolfgang Armbrecht told German magazine auto motor und sport.
Mini aims for a one-digit percentage growth rate this year, Armbrecht added, bucking the overall trend in the industry. Car sales across the globe have plummeted as consumers retrench in the face of mass layoffs and a credit crunch. Mini brand sales dropped 20.8 percent in November, but were still up 7.6 percent since the beginning of the year compared to the same period last year with 217,400 vehicles sold.
In 2007, BMW, the world's top premium carmaker, sold 222,900 Minis, 18.5 percent more than in 2006. The German magazine also reported, citing sales and marketing head Ian Robertson, that BMW would not pull out of Formula One racing despite the global economic crisis, forcing out Japanese carmakers.
In Germany, Europe's biggest auto market, new car sales are expected to hit post-reunification lows this year and next before recovering somewhat in 2010, the VDA auto industry association forecast earlier this month. Volkswagen's Czech unit Skoda Auto is among those who feel the pinch and has cut production in the wake of falling demand.
Reinhard Jung, head of Skoda, withdrew the company's outlook for next year as he told auto motor und sport magazine that a valid forecast for 2009 was impossible. "We are at the moment still in a phase where we get negative news from individual markets on a weekly, almost daily, basis," Jung told the magazine. He still expects Skoda to do better than in competitors.
Last month, a Skoda executive said the company aimed to match 2008's sales level next year. In November, the company cancelled its initial target of producing 700,000 vehicles in 2008 and only said it would produce more cars in 2008 than in 2007. Jung added that the company's target to reach sales of more than one million vehicles "by 2010/11 or 2012 is unrealistic".
Skoda, the largest Czech exporter and the biggest company by sales, is facing plummeting sales in its main markets such as Spain, Ukraine and the UK. Reports said earlier this month that Skoda's production cut back would continue next year and that the company would halt work on Fridays in the first half of 2009. Jung said Skoda would not necessarily make use of this arrangement and expected to be able to switch back to a five-day-week in the short-term.
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