Cadillac Predicts Sales In China To Triple by 2016, Or Was That Globally?
Watching the live streaming video of Cadillac’s reveal of the all-new larger and lighter 2014 CTS last night in New York City, something GM Vice President Global Cadillac Bob Ferguson said caught my ear, about Cadillac tripling its sales over the next three years. That’s quite an improvement, so after the event I watched the recorded video and now that I’ve listened to Ferguson’s remarks a few times, and even transcribed it, I’m not sure exactly what he meant. From the context, really the word “and”, it’s hard for me to tell if he was talking about tripling Cadillac’s sales in China, currently the world’s largest market for luxury cars or if he meant overall, globally. Let me know what you think, the transcript is after the break.
Ferguson also said that so for the first two months of 2013 Cadillac sales are up 32% in North America and that 70% of ATS buyers have never bought a Cadillac before. He didn’t say whether or not they had owned or cross-shopped a BMW 3 Series, the benchmark for the ATS and other cars in its class, or what brands of cars they used as trade-ins.
We hope you like what you see and we hope you find the trajectory of Cadillac is clear, expanding, growing, elevating to another level and the new CTS will help propel us there. As you know the new ATS sports sedan is the North American Car of the Year. What you may not know is that 70% of ATS buyers are new to Cadillac and that’s helping to move us forward as well. Through the first two months of 2013, sales are up 32% here in North America. In China, the world’s largest luxury market, we’re taking big steps forward [not a great leap forward? – RJS] and we expect sales to triple over the next three years.
Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can get a parallax view at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks – RJS
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He's talking about China. Like everybody else said, it's not a new line. I dunno how he plans to get there without building the CTS locally, but we'll see.
Most interesting to me today was "Despite repeated revival promises, Cadillac's U.S. market share has remained relatively unchanged over the past 10 years, bouncing between a high of 1.35% in 2005 to 1.05% at the end of 2012." said some random website somewhere with way too many staffers and chart-y type people. That has to depress the Lincoln team as they stare up that mountain.