Brilliance China Automotive Holdings is targeting 40 per cent sales growth for its Shenyang-made BMW sedans this year after last year's blockbuster growth led to record turnover and profits.
The mainland joint venture partner of the German luxury carmaker is targeting sales of 100,000 units this year. That would be an increase of 42 per cent on last year's record sales of 70,488 units, which in turn was up 57 per cent from 2009.
Brilliance expects this year's sales to be driven by expansion of its retail network. The company plans to increase it total number of dealerships and showrooms on the mainland to 270 outlets by December, up from 210 outlets at the end of last year.
But it expects even more growth to follow next year, when a major expansion to the company's production facilities begins coming online towards a goal of tripling annual output capacity to 300,000 cars by 2013.
'For the past few years we have been capacity-constrained and have been unable to keep up with the demand in the market,' Brilliance chairman Wu Xiaoan said yesterday. 'We are confident that our growth prospects will be better than those of our competitors.'
Brilliance swung to record net profit of 1.27 billion yuan last year, compared with a loss of 1.64 billion yuan in 2009. The profit figure was 16 per cent higher than the 1.09 billion yuan forecast in a Bloomberg survey of analysts.
The dramatic turnaround was due to booming BMW sales on the mainland and the company's decision to sell off its loss-making Zhonghua sedan unit. Turnover rose 45.5 per cent to 8.95 billion yuan last year.
