BMW Slightly increased sales of its core brand in the second quarter thanks to strong growth in electric cars. The Munich carmaker sold 565,553 BMW cars from April to June, a good 2 percent more than in the same period last year, as the company announced on Wednesday. The core brand sold almost 1.1 million vehicles in the first half of the year, an increase of 2.3 percent.
Sales of electric cars rose particularly significantly in the second quarter. Of the approximately 565,000 cars sold, almost 108,000 were battery-electric vehicles, which represents an increase of 22.2 percent compared to the same quarter of the previous year. However, growth is always significantly weaker than in the previous year as a whole. In 2023, BMW reported growth of almost three quarters in pure electric vehicles – also thanks to the purchase bonus for electric cars.
The BMW subsidiaries Mini and Rolls Royce, however, weakened. Sales figures for the entire group were impacted by the collapse of the Mini brand, of which BMW sold just under 52,000 units, 27 percent fewer than a year ago. Constant model changes were noticeable at Mini. In the first half of the year, Mini sold 114,000 cars (minus 18.7 percent), while sales of the luxury brand Rolls Royce fell by 11 percent to 2,819 cars.
The entire BMW Group, including Mini and Rolls Royce, sold around 1.2 million vehicles in the first half of the year, 0.1 percent below the previous year’s level.
BMW Sales Director Jochen Goller (51) nevertheless assessed the development “in a challenging market environment” positively: “In the first six months of the year we managed to achieve double-digit growth with fully electric vehicles and models from the upper premium segment.”