Cars priced above ₹1.5 crore fetch 25% of Merc India sales

The most expensive car in the AMG series is the G63, at ₹3.80 crore. Mercedes Benz, India’s largest luxury car manufacturer, will launch two more AMGs within a year, as it seeks to shift its focus away from volumes to high-value models.

The company saw a 37% rise in the average selling price of its vehicles between January and March 2023 from the year ago, with the top-end vehicle segment growing 107%, a senior company executive said.

Mercedes Benz on Tuesday launched its first ever plug-in hybrid vehicle, which is based on an F1-derived hybrid powertrain. The AMG GT63 S E Performance has a starting price of ₹3.3 crore.

The performance hyper-car is Mercedes Benz’s most powerful production vehicle yet for India, and the second AMG launch this year, after the AMG E53 Cabriolet in January.

Last year, Mercedes Benz had sold nearly 16,000 units, out of which 22% were in the ₹1 crore-plus category. The automaker commands a 50% share in India’s luxury vehicle market, followed by German peers BMW and Audi.

“Globally, we want to shift this narrative. We are a luxury brand and the story for us is to deliver customer experience. If we mix volumes with this strategy, we’d be going down the path of bringing in products at lower price points, but don’t represent the best in our portfolio. We have a clear top-end strategy. It’s not about the volumes now but to enhance desirability of the brand,” Santosh Iyer, managing director and chief executive officer, Mercedes Benz India, said in an interview.

While the Stuttgart-based automaker’s strategic focus will be to increase sales of top-end models, Iyer does not expect the contribution of ultra-luxury cars to its total sales to rise this year due to supply-side constraints.

“These are models have the longest waiting periods. The Maybachs are sold out for the next 6-8 months, G-Wagons are sold out for 12 months, the GLS Maybach is sold out, the EQS is unavailable for the next three months. The GLS has a six-month waiting period. The waiting period also depends on allocations because many of them are CBUs (completely-built up cars) we import, so this means it’s not the potential for growth but availability of vehicles that will keep contributions restricted to the 22-25% range,” Iyer said.

“AMG’s contribution to our sales swings rapidly based on the arrival of cars, but they are definitely the backbone of our top-end vehicle category story and is a forerunner in the segment,” he added. “We have 10 launches planned for this year, and half of them will be in this segment. Our typical AMG customer would already own 5-6 luxury cars, and about half will be Mercedes Benz models, so we want to keep our focus on this segment of customers.”

Mercedes Benz is also going to introduce four new electric cars in the next 12-18 months.

“We launched the EQB and the EQS in the last quarter of 2022, and we are already looking at close to 4% of our total sales coming from these models,”Iyer said. The EQS is Mercedes’ flagship electric sedan.