BERLIN — Daimler has seen business at Mercedes-Benz stabilize in China after the country ended coronavirus lockdowns, a senior manager at the German carmaker told a newspaper on Sunday.
“In China alone, we sold around 50,000 vehicles again in March. That makes us confident,”, said Markus Schaefer, managing board member for production, told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
Mercedes-Benz delivered approximately 477,400 passenger vehicles worldwide between January and March. The report did not say how many of those went to customers in China, who bought 694,200 Mercedes-Benz light vehicles last year, or 29 percent of total global sales.
Starting Monday, cars are set to roll off Daimler’s assembly line again in Germany. The Sindelfingen and Bremen passenger-car plants will start production of E- and S-Class vehicles.
China is the largest market for the S-Class built in Sindelfingen. Normally several hundred vehicles roll off the assembly line in Sindelfingen every day.
“We won’t reach this number right away when production starts next week,” said Schaefer.
Daimler reported a plunge of nearly 70 percent in first-quarter operating profit on Thursday due to the pandemic and warned that the cash flow it uses to pay dividends would fall this year.
