With the third quarter of the year in its rearview mirror, BMW has crunched the numbers for the first nine months of 2024. The math isn t looking great since deliveries to customers are down by 2.3% compared to the January-September 2023 interval. The German luxury brand has sold 1,583,485 cars so far this year. Q3 was particularly bad as shipments decreased by 11.4%.
MINI plummeted by 20.9% through September, falling to 166,703 cars. However, the drop is partially explained by the fact that the Oxford-based automaker basically renewed its entire lineup this year. Earlier this week, it unveiled the new Cooper Convertible to round off its growing portfolio that now includes an Aceman small electric crossover.
Through September, demand dropped in all major regions, except for Europe. On the Old Continent, BMW (including MINI) sold 679,432 cars in the first nine months of the year, up by 1.4% compared to the same period of 2023. However, deliveries are down by 5.1% to 195,381 cars at home in Germany. In Asia, sales suffered a 10.7% decline to 699,262 units.
Percentagewise, the biggest drop is predictably in China where BMW fell by 13.1% to 523,638 vehicles. In the Americas, 330,546 cars were delivered from January until September, or 2.2% less than last year. Talking strictly about the United States, sales are down by 2.1% to 271,399 units.
As for Rolls-Royce, which just launched the Ghost facelift, it s not having a great year either. The ultra-luxury brand sold 3,970 vehicles, representing a decrease of 12.8%. Combined, the BMW Group Automotive with all three companies posted 4.5% lower sales through September, at 1,754,158 cars.
As for the two-wheeled division, BMW Motorrad is almost flat so far this year. Shipments dropped by 0.9% to 163,436.
Why is 2024 such a difficult year for the BMW Group? The company puts the blame on the faulty Integrated Braking System (IBS) that has impacted 1.5 million cars of which 320,000 haven t been delivered to customers yet.
In addition, a difficult market environment in China has forced the company to readjust its sales goals for 2024. It initially wanted to deliver more cars than last year’s record-breaking performance but now it s projecting it ll sell fewer.
Source: BMW
First published by https://www.bmwblog.com
