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NEWS
Dog-eat-dog December
The 12th month may lead into the season of giving, but for the car industry it's better to receiveNew Year's Eve is the best day of the year to buy a new car, according to the Senior Manager for Corporate Communications at Mercedes-Benz.
David McCarthy last week told motoring.com.au that December can be the sort of month that drives sales staff to distraction.
"It's a challenging retail month because there's a few days off and people are on holidays," he explained.
Mr McCarthy suggests the best time to order a car is as soon as your friendly local dealer opens the doors for business on New Year's Eve. That's when anxiety to clear stock and hit sales targets will have reached its zenith.
In the lead-up to Christmas, it's that very anxiety that is the catalyst for sales staff to get on the blower, prospecting for more customers to push them across the line. Not all dealers, distributors or sales staff will find themselves in that position, Mr McCarthy cautions, but the canny buyer will presumably shop around to find the dealership and sales staff who have reached that point of desperation.
"In all these things you've got a target – and the last thing you want to be doing is trying to achieve your target at the last minute," the Benz exec said.
At head office level Mercedes-Benz was running out of stock in the final days of last year, which further complicated the task of achieving sales, although Mr McCarthy says the company has met its internal targets for 2012.
Among the high points for the prestige importer was the performance of the new B-Class, only on sale in its latest iteration since March. With sales of 2035 for the year – including a handful (at least 23) for the runout model in the first quarter – the B-Class was the top-selling car in its VFACTS segment. Archrival BMW's 1 Series came close with sales of 1920 for the year. Also going on sale in March, the new M-Class came within 50 units of overtaking the X5 (2729 versus 2778 for the BMW). And as we reported last week, sales of Mercedes AMG models topped 1200 units for the year – a new record.
Mr McCarthy anticipates that 2013 will be a busy year for Mercedes-Benz and its dealer network, with new models arriving during the course of the year, in the form of A-Class, E-Class, S-Class, CLA and GL.
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Written byKen Gratton
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