Daimler to Drop Maybach, Focus on S-Class

By Andreas Cremer - Nov 26, 2011 1:44 AM GMT+0700

Daimler AG will shut down the super- luxury Maybach brand to end almost a decade of losses from an auto that sells for more than $350,000 when a revamped version of the flagship Mercedes-Benz S-Class comes to market in 2013.

“It would not make sense to develop a successor model,” Chief Executive Officer Dieter Zetsche said in remarks confirmed by Daimler spokesman Marc Binder. “The coming S-Class is in such a way a superior vehicle that it can replace the Maybach.”

Daimler hasn’t made a profit on the Maybach after deciding to reintroduce the 1930s-era marque in 2002, Zetsche said. Mercedes will double variations of the 72,000-euro ($95,000) S- Class to six as it seeks to boost annual vehicle sales by at least 10,000 a year and step up its challenge to Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) as the world’s top luxury-car maker.

BMW and Volkswagen AG’s Audi have grown at more than five times the pace of Mercedes over the past decade by adding new offerings faster. The 125-year-old manufacturer, which has also dropped to third in profitability, lost the luxury-car sales lead to BMW in 2005 and slipped behind Audi this year.

On the Offensive

“Mercedes is now also mounting the attack in the high-end segment,” Zetsche said in comments to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, to be published tomorrow. “We have always dominated this segment and that should continue to be the case. We don’t want to wait until the others pull ahead.”

Daimler held extensive internal discussions on “which route promises the greatest possible success in the luxury segment,” before concluding that sales prospects were better at Mercedes than at Maybach, the CEO said.

U.K. luxury sports-car maker Aston Martin, which said at the Frankfurt motor show in September that it expected to conclude talks on cooperation with Mercedes within weeks, declined to comment on the ramifications of Daimler’s comments. Zetsche had said at the expo that the talks concerned Maybach.

“We’ve been talking with Mercedes for some time,” Aston Martin spokesman Matthew Clarke said today by telephone.

Maybach hasn’t seriously challenged BMW’s Rolls-Royce and Volkswagen AG (VOW)’s Bentley since it its reintroduction, with sales topped out at 600 cars in 2003 and sliding to 200 last year. Rolls-Royce sold 2,700 vehicles in 2010 and Bentley 5,100.

To contact the reporter on this story: Andreas Cremer in Berlin at acremer@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net