Last week, BMW announced a positive outlook for the fourth quarter of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, saying that its order book is full and that it does not intend to lower its prices to compete with other automakers. This was clearly aimed towards Tesla and Lucid. The two EV companies have recently cut prices for several models by a significant amount. For example, Lucid slashed the price of its Air Touring model to $87,500 from $95,000 and the Grand Touring by $10,000 to $115,600. Tesla has slashed the prices of its Model S to $74,990.
BMW says that its vehicle availability was improving as the supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic and the chip shortage were easing, but it also faced higher costs for materials and logistics, especially for labor. BMW’s CEO Oliver Zipse said that the company was not interested in cutting prices to gain market share, especially in China, where the competition for electric vehicle sales has been fierce this year. He said that BMW’s strategy was to offer high-quality products at reasonable prices and to grow organically. For example, BMW’s i4 and iX models are selling extremely well in most markets.
One of the factors that boosted BMW’s revenues, which reached 38.5 billion euros ($40.92 billion) in the quarter, was the strong performance of its higher-priced and fully electric models, which have been gaining popularity among customers.
BMW’s net profit fell 7.7% year-on-year in the quarter, but this was mainly due to a one-off effect from last year, when the company took majority control of its Chinese joint venture. BMW also said that it felt a negative impact of 200 million euros from currency and raw material fluctuations.
[Source: Reuters]
