[Sick Speed]

So let the rest of the world pay a premium price since the US market will account for roughly 25% of M3 sales at 5% of the profit average of sales in other countries. With that being the case if I were the US sales manager for BMW USA who needed to forecast 2008 sales I would just slash production estimates and allocations by 50% keeping a higher profit margin on lower sales volume effectively decreasing my cost of sales.

As opposed to your scenario where you propose BMW should lower the cost to the US consumer because our dollar is weak meaning when it gets converted back into EUR they lose even MORE profit.

In a simple business model why do you think BMW would do this? I am being serious with this question.

I did some currency conversions off of a few of BMW's highest selling M markets and the rough estimates for base pricing in the US IF BMW kept it consistent with the rest of the world converts to an average of $93K.

If you are saying that the "premium" BMW owner will most likely be unwilling to pay this cost for the M then I would disagree. But there are not nearly as many "premium" BMW owners as their are standard BMW owners. And I would agree with you that the standard BMW owner who may have been considering upgrading to an M would not with a price of $93K staring at them.

BMW may not sell as many at that price but they CAN sell less at that price and make more profit at a lower cost of sales which translates to higher earnings on sales which translates to INCREASED share holder equity which means job security for the CEO. And the sole purpose for existence of any CEO in a publicly traded company is to do one thing and one thing only. INCREASE SHAREHOLDER EQUITY AND RETURN.

So your original argument is based on IF BMW were to maintain 50,000 unit sales in the US then I agree with you that they would need to lower the cost. However, they cannot lower the cost because they will lose a ton of profit. Not to mention how disjointed the rest of the planet will be that we Americans are getting the same car they shelled out a pretty penny for at 25% less cost.

The price will be higher than what most people on this board want and BMW will make less of them.