Daimler AG announced it will shut down the luxury Maybach brand to end almost a decade of losses and concentrate on developing vehicles under its much more successful Mercedes brand.
Photo: Maybach luxury car, by Daimler
Daimler will stop producing the when a new version of the Mercedes S-Class comes to market in 2013, Chief Executive Officer Dieter Zetsche said in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Since its launch in 2002, the $350,000 Maybach didn’t bring profit to the company that created the luxury car attempting to reintroduce the 1930s-era marque.
With shutting up Maybach, Mercedes will double variations of the $95,000 S-Class to six as it intends to boost annual vehicle sales by at least 10,000 a year and step up its challenge to BMW AG as the world’s top luxury-car maker, says Bloomberg Business Week.
“Closing down Maybach is a rational and financially wise decision,” said Arndt Ellinghorst, an analyst at Credit Suisse in London. “The brand has never managed to live up to its heritage. It makes good sense to enhance the S-Class; there’ll be huge demand, especially in emerging markets.”
Over the past decade, BMW and Volkswagen AG’s Audi have grown at more than five times leaving Mercedes behind. The automaker that has been celebrating its 125th anniversary this year lost the luxury-car sales lead to BMW in 2005 and slipped behind Audi this year. Daimler decided to shut down the unsuccessful brand that was named after a German engineer Wilhelm Maybach, who had produced a line of limousine-size cars in the ’20s and ’30s, to boost its S-class vehicles sales.
It takes 60 days to produce an average Maybach versus three to four days for a typical Mercedes. Though Maybach was purchased by some stars including Madonna and featured in the ‘ Sex and the City2’ film, the car hasn’t seriously challenged its rivals: BMW’s Rolls-Royce and Volkswagen AG’s Bentley. Since its reintroduction Maybach sales topped out at 600 cars in 2003 and dropped to 200 last year. In comparison, Rolls-Royce sold 2,700 vehicles in 2010 and Bentley 5,100.
