- Mercedes had a disappointing third quarter as their car division saw a slight decrease in sales.
- Electric vehicle deliveries were down 31% compared to a year ago.
- Group revenue fell 6.7% in Q3, while earnings per share dropped 47.5%.
Mercedes has long been a huge proponent of electric vehicles, and their lineup proves it. The company’s offerings include the EQA, EQB, EQE, EQE SUV, EQS, EQS SUV, and more recently, even an electric G-Class. Depending on the market, you can also find the EQT and EQV rounding out the electric range. It’s an impressive array of EVs—but the numbers suggest Mercedes may have overplayed its hand.
That’s a ton of electric vehicles and they’re coming back to haunt the luxury brand as third quarter sales of EVs plummeted 31 percent from a year ago. Customers only snapped up 42,544 units in Q3, which was a drop of 19,077.
More: Chinese Buyers Are Ditching German Cars For Local Brands, And That’s Bad News For Mercedes
Unfortunately for Mercedes, the year-to-date picture isn’t much better as electric vehicle sales are off 22.1%. Through the first nine months of the year, the brand has only sold 135,908 EVs and that’s down from 174,471 units this time last year.
And it’s not just the EVs that are struggling. Mercedes-Benz Cars’ overall sales also slipped, dropping 1.4% to 503,573 units. While that might seem like a modest decrease, plug-in hybrids sales fell 14.7%, totaling just 87,232 units—a worrisome trend for a brand heavily invested in electrification.
Mercedes-Benz Group Q3 Results
Mercedes-Benz Vans also underperformed, so it’s not surprising that third quarter Group revenues fell 6.7%. That doesn’t sound too bad, but the big news is that earnings before interest and taxes dropped 48%, while earnings per share fell 47.5% to €1.81 ($1.96).
The latter two figures paint a bad picture, but Mercedes tried to put a positive spin on things by claiming “solid sales … despite product transitions, a challenging market environment and fierce competition, particularly in China.” However, CFO Harald Wilhelm was more direct as he said “The Q3 results do not meet our ambitions.” The financial guru added, Mercedes is “taking a prudent view about market evolution going forward and … will step up all efforts on further efficiency increases and cost improvements across the business.”
For the year, Mercedes-Benz Cars expects sales to be “slightly below” 2023 levels. As such, they’re expecting the fourth quarter to be a repeat of Q3, although it could be aided by better availability of high-end models including the SL- and G-Class as well as the AMG GT and AMG E-Class.