Mercedes-Chef Ola Källenius im Interview: Die nächsten Jahre werden „tough“

Hello. Welcome to Untertürkheim.

If we ask what gift our founding fathers gave us, it is personal freedom. The ability to decide for ourselves. I can go anywhere I want. That is a very precious asset. Now, 140 years later, technology has advanced, and the original invention is being reinvented. We are moving toward zero emissions. We have the fully digitalized, completely intelligent car. So, I think it is a very good reason to celebrate, but like Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz, we should not look in the rearview mirror but through the windshield. What comes next? That is what matters.

The global economy, and also the globally networked automotive industry, is already in an abnormal situation. I don't know if it's number one, but what are the framework conditions affecting us? One is China as the largest automotive market. Customer behavior there has become a bit calmer. In the last two and a half years after COVID, we see that market dynamics are not as they were for 15 or 20 years—only growth. And that combined with incredibly intense competition. 100 car companies are vying for a market that can maybe support 30 to 40. That's one. Global trade: the US administration has decided to fundamentally change the model. If you look at export companies or the export industry, especially the European automotive industry, it has a big impact, that's true. And then perhaps the fact that the transformation toward zero-emission mobility is very heterogeneous worldwide across the 150 markets we operate in. I think it's obvious that it will take longer. So we have to maintain this complexity, these dual investments for longer. And if Europe has also lost growth dynamics in recent years, then it feels like it could become a perfect storm.

Medium to long term, you have to look at the industrial structures. We have been accustomed for decades to working with only 2.5% tariffs from Europe to the USA, so you could always count on economies of scale beating everything. If you then go to a level of 15%, that's a completely different matter. Then you have to look at what my industrial footprint looks like, both at the vehicle level and at the component level. The automotive industry is such that if you wanted to relocate a vehicle, saying there's a larger growth market or optimizing cost structures, you can't do that at the push of a button. It requires adjustments over 3, 4, 5 years. But I wouldn't make such production footprint decisions solely based on tariffs. You also have to think about where the market is moving. Do I see a growth perspective? The decisions we make are always fundamentally long-term. Not a horizon of 5 years, but 10 years plus or even decades.

When we started to really expand our production network in the USA, it began with our large SUVs in our plant in Alabama, and over time we also built a plant for vans in South Carolina. The first analysis is always how the market is developing. With the large SUVs—GLE, GLS and various derivatives—we have been incredibly successful. The American market is a large market for them, that's obvious, but the trend toward SUVs is unbroken. Then we look at our portfolio: what is the next product where we have the largest footprint for the North American market? And that is the GLC. Therefore, in the next round with the GLC, we want to increase our market share in that segment in the US, to drive growth, and in that context, we also look at the industrial structures, how we can optimize costs and take tariffs into account.