A decline in sales in the fourth quarter has affected the car manufacturer Mercedes Benz spoiled the annual balance sheet. In total, the group sold 2.04 million cars in its car division last year, as it announced on Thursday. That was about the same as a year before. The Stuttgart-based company sold 514,000 cars in the fourth quarter of 2023, a decrease of 4 percent.
In particular, delivery bottlenecks for 48-volt batteries, but also the model change for the important E-Class, have recently had a negative impact. With sales, Mercedes is further behind its arch-rival BMW, which sold 2.56 million cars from its brands last year, increasing by 6.5 percent. The VW subsidiary Audi in third place delivered 1.9 million cars, 17 percent more than in the previous year.
Sales record for delivery vans
Mercedes recorded large increases in fully electric cars (BEVs). Sales here grew by 61 percent to 240,600 cars. That was a share of almost 12 percent of total sales after a good 7 percent in the previous year. BMW is further ahead here too: for the Munich-based company, purely battery-powered cars accounted for 15 percent of sales. At Audi it was 9 percent.
Mercedes-Benz achieved a sales record for delivery vans with an increase of 8 percent to 447,800 vans. This put the Stuttgart team ahead of their rivals Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles (VWN), which increased its deliveries last year by almost a quarter to 409,400 vehicles.