After BMW and Volkswagen, Mercedes’ turn: the endless descent into hell of the German automobile
DECRYPTION - The famous brand with the star is considering factory closures in Germany. Production costs are too high there.
In 1926, in Stuttgart, the merger of the companies of inventors Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler gave birth to Mercedes-Benz. A century later, the legendary firm was in turn overtaken by the crisis of German manufacturers. The star of Mercedes-Benz is fading, and with it, the entire industrial model of “made in Germany”.
On Thursday, an internal message posted on the group's intranet put pressure on its German employees. The company is freezing all its investments in Germany, it stipulates, and is now examining "in a concrete and detailed manner" which sites - among the ten assembly and component factories that the group has across the Rhine - it can still afford to keep on national soil. Two would be directly threatened with closure.
Like Volkswagen or BMW, the group is seeing its sales fall in China, the world's largest automobile market. Competition from Chinese manufacturers is very strong there.
Machine-translated from French
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- Le Figaro13 Nov, 18:35
| Publisher Le Figaro (established tier) | +76 |
| Total | 76 |
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