Es are once again dream numbers that Mercedes presented on Friday: Earnings before interest and taxes of more than 20 billion euros, the bottom line is that the group earned almost 15 billion euros, a third more than in the previous year.
For the group, this means: The luxury strategy continues to work, but now it really has to prove itself. The semiconductor shortage is slowly but surely over. There are enough vehicles on the market again. And with that, the price wars of the past should come back, even if Mercedes keeps emphasizing that it doesn’t want to do that. But the fact that there were price wars ultimately had structural reasons and was not a whim of the managers responsible at the time.
But if you look not just at the group, but at the whole country, the numbers mean something else: the swan song for the German auto industry sometimes takes on somewhat strange traits. German manufacturers are making record profits and the public sometimes gets the impression that the industry is on the brink of extinction.
As great as the challenges in terms of electromobility and digitization are and as difficult as the transformation is, especially for many automotive suppliers: corporations that generate such surpluses are everything but a restructuring case.