The biggest question surrounding all car makers in 2020 was how low their sales would go, considering the pandemic crisis around us. It definitely wasn’t the best year for BMW but the drop in sales was lower than anticipated. At the beginning of the lockdown, various analysts said a drop of 20 percent wouldn’t be far fetched and yet, today we got the final numbers and BMW is looking good with a drop of just 8.4 percent.
This allowed the Bavarian company to keep its title in the premium segment, for the 17th consecutive year. In total, 2,324,809 BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce vehicles (-8.4%) were delivered to customers worldwide but that’s just the big picture. The devil is in the details. For example, sales recovered in the fourth quarter, where BMW recorded an actual increase in sales compared to 2019, delivering 3.2 percent more cars than in the same period of the year before which is mighty impressive.
“We responded to the effects of the corona pandemic with great agility in sales management and production. As a result, we succeeded in concluding the year with a strong fourth quarter and once again we lead the premium segment worldwide,” underlined Pieter Nota, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG responsible for Customer, Brands and Sales. The BMW brand finished the year with a total of 2,028,659 (-7.2%) vehicles delivered to customers worldwide.
A significant contribution was made by the strong performance of the models in the upper luxury segment, which increased by 12.4 percent year-on-year to a total of 115,420 units thanks to the 7 Series, 8 Series and BMW X7. Sales of these highly profitable models have increased by more than 70 percent overall since 2018. BMW M models were also doing great, reporting the best sales figures in history and that’s without the new M3 and M4 models on the market.
