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      04-25-2011, 12:02 PM   #58
Eau Rouge
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2012 BMW E92 M3  [9.00]
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dante View Post
OK, my last post regarding this matter, because again you fail to back your false arguments with numbers.

In 2010, BMW sold most of its cars where: Right, in Germany. 266,009 units, to be precise. Followed closly by the second largest market: USA, with 265,757 units sold. China coming in as third with 168,998 cars sold. The fourth largest market btw. is another European country: UK, with 157,312 units sold. (source: www.BMWGroup.com)

All of the last named 3 alone pay more for the same car (again taxes and import duties left aside, converted to EUR) as US buyers.

So please stop trying to convince others the U.S. market isn't in any way subsidized by other countries.
AFAIK, the M brand has to be a financially profitable operation. The AG numbers do not prove either way whether BMW is or isn't using profit from global business to offset business costs in the US market. However, more importantly, M brand is an entity that must be profitable or come under the ax.

And it is M, M3 pricing specifically, that we are talking about. While BMW AG doesn't release model/market specific data, it does release M brand data. Based on the quoted passage below, we can know that...

#1 market for M cars = USA (42.7% of global M brand cars)
#2 market for M cars = Germany (10.7% of global M brand cars)

If there is any "subsidizing" of prices in a particular market, and I'm skeptical that there is, which operation do you think is more profitable to M brand and BMW AG as a whole; the German M market or the US M market?

I rest my case.

Quote:
The 14.2 percent global growth in new car registrations posted by the BMW AG subsidiary last year bears witness to the enduringly strong fascination exerted by these high-performance sports cars. The production phase-out of the BMW M5 and BMW M6 models was more than compensated for by a consistently high demand for the BMW M3 and the newly introduced all-wheel-drive models BMW X5 M and BMW X6 M. Yet again the BMW M3 demonstrated its status as the most popular ambassador for the M ethos. Worldwide, 5,729 units of the BMW M3 Coupé were sold, to which were added 2,544 units of the BMW M3 Convertible and 1,843 BMW M3 Saloons. Sales of the BMW X5 M and BMW X6 M totalled 2,778 and 3,082 respectively.

The most important single market in 2010 was once again the USA, where overall BMW M car sales rose by more than 6 percent to 6,821. The number two sales region, as before, was the German domestic market with sales of 1,716 cars, followed by Britain and Northern Ireland with 1,264 units.

http://www.m3post.com/forums/showthread.php?t=483903
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