Rolls-Royce is accustomed to catering towards customers for whom price is no object. So despite the enormous costs involved in importing new cars into Japan, the luxury automaker is steadily expanding its footprint in the insular island nation.
Japan stands as Rolls-Royce’s fourth largest individual market in the world, but prior to this year it had only three dealerships there: one in Tokyo, another in Yokohama, and (from 2013) a third in Osaka. The past few months, however, have seen two more showrooms open in Nagoya and Fukuoka. And in the first half of next year, there’ll be a sixth opening in Hiroshima.
Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös announced the expansion while visiting the country, touring the five existing showrooms. After the company’s sales in the critical Chinese market dropped by over 50 percent last year, its success in Japan has been critical to its overall growth in the Asia Pacific region.
The Wraith stands as the company’s most popular model in Japan as the current Phantom winds down its lifecycle before the next-generation model arrives in 2018. Partially because of the markup margin inherent in such high-end automobiles, Rolls-Royce is able to partially offset the cost of importation to Japan. Where the Wraith costs approximately $300,000 in the US, it costs 34.9 million yen in Japan, or the approximate equivalent of $346,000. Meanwhile the Cadillac CT6’s sticker price nearly doubles by the time it crosses the Pacific.
The Japanese showrooms represent less than five percent of the total number of Rolls-Royce dealers around the world, but then Japan only represents 1.7 percent of the world’s population. The automaker currently supplies some 130 dealers in fewer than 50 countries, making its network roughly the same size as Lamborghini’s.
36 of those dealers are located in the United States, with seven of those in California alone and another six in Florida. The United Arab Emirates, by comparison, only has three Rolls-Royce dealers, although one of them regularly ranks as the brand’s largest and most successful in the world.
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