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New Sales and Marketing Head for Bugatti |
 Dr Stefan Brungs Stefan Brungs started his career in the Volkswagen Group as head of the marketing strategy and conception of the Volkswagen brand and in 1997, took over the sales for the Northwest region of Europe. From 1999 to 2004 Brungs ran Bentley‘s European business as its managing director. During this time, Bentley successfully launched the Continental GT, expanding the brand to a new customer demographic.
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Changing strategy for growth |
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Frank Bernthaler, director, sales and marketing for Daimler Middle East, talks to Automan about various aspects of the market for luxury cars in the region
 Mercedes-Benz Cars Middle East and Levant has reported May as its best month so far in the year with retail sales of 1,526 units across the region. Frank Bernthaler, Director of Sales and Marketing says this performance is best for the company since October 2008. It’s no secret that the year 2009 has been difficult for everybody in the automotive business including Daimler. A radical business strategy was adopted where the regional’s office focus was to get the cash flow running and staying alive, basically using tried and tested tools of the trade such as cash incentives and low margins to push metal and clear stocks.
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Automan meets Bentley’s regional boss during an exclusive drive in Oman for three of the brand’s cars – including the Continental Supersport.
 Chris Buxton has a very down to earth approach for the key man behind a brand like Bentley
Q: Bentley has a unique approach to sales in the region adding India into the basket of countries you handle. How important are the new growth markets of China and India to a brand like Bentley?
A: I am just back from the quarterly sales conference in the UK and the results show that to China, we just can’t supply enough cars. They take everything we can build for them. The rest of the world is still struggling, America is down, Europe is down, India is consistent with the Middle East. It is a steady market, where we are slowly growing and the dilemma for us and many other companies is this big China-India debate.
I was at the big Mulsanne launch in Delhi two weeks ago and that was the question that I kept getting asked, how big is China and how big is India? And its a learning curve for me – having never worked in China though I go to India quite a bit, India is a much smaller market and though we’ve been longer in India we all know that the economies of th etwo countries are vastly different in many respects so we may probably sell less in India. But the strange fact is that there are probably more Bentleys in India today than there are in China. I don’t like quoting figures since they change so often, but we’ll probaby do about 25-30 units in India this year and we may do a thousand in China. But as I stand here today, there are more Bentleys in India than China.
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Automan meets Director of Design, Marek Reichman Reichman led the in-house design team which penned the Aston Martin Rapide
 Q: As a designer, what’s your take on the Rapide?
A: It’s like a race horse standing still, You can see its power and elegance, the shape of the car’s rear haunches are muscular conveying the power that lies beneath while its low stance produces a powerful look.
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Bridgestone marks a successful year in Oman |
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We interviewed Mohan Menon, General Manager of Towell Auto Centre’s TBA arm and spoke to him at length about the latest accolades won by his team from Bridgestone
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Bridgestone announces every year awards for performance related to competition between the countries which are in the zone. Bridgestone has strategic business units and these comprise of areas where the countries depending on geographical locations are covered. In the local strategic business unit, all the Middle East and Africa are covered. We are talking of about 70 countries. Last year was a recession year during which everybody was complaining about business dropping between 30 to 40% and as a result Bridgestone set up a competition between the importers in these 70 countries saying that we will give the criteria like sales, strategies applied, initiatives taken during the year, and so on.
At the end of the day, we at Towell Auto Centre exceeded the 2008 sales, which no other country could emulate because 2008 was a so-called boom year. Everybody was automatically increasing sales over 2007, but somebody increasing sales in 2009 over 2008 was the surprise. Bridgestone calculates what is called raw rubber tonnage and we did about 5% more in 2009., while other countries did significantly lower than 2008.
Our market went down by around 30% too, so the good news is that we captured marketshare from others, because all our customers dropped volumes and we couldn’t have done so well without gaining customers from other brands.
How did we achieve this? Because we had strategies planned from December 2008 with the principals, we put in a lot of technical inputs, we told the customer you are now trying to save money and here’s how to do it. Eventually in all our various channels, we have channels like the fleet channel, our retail shops, the ministry channel, so in each channel we had a separate focus we didn’t compromise on people – people are our strength, trained and ready – we didn’t sack anybody or send anyone home. The end result was that we were able to exceed our 2008 volumes.
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 Bob Lutz, set to retire on May 1st 2010 Lutz, 78, rejoined GM September 1, 2001, as the head of product development, and has led the company’s resurgence in developing great cars and trucks. He also worked at BMW, Chrysler and Ford.
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Girls of the frankfurt motorshow |
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Longbridge scion from Nanjing
We interviewed Phil Horton, Managing Director of BMW Middle East for his insight on the brand’s readiness for...