Mercedes 2012 Annual Report Download - page 17

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Daimler Financial Services can look back on yet another successful year.
New business and contract volume set new records. In Asia in particular,
we continued to expand our service offerings. We are ahead worldwide with
our new flexible mobility services as well. That’s true for our established
services such as “car2go” and for additional services like “moovel” – an innovative
new platform that networks different modes of transportation.
That all goes to make one thing clear: 2012 was a year of many successes.
But it’s also true that not all of our goals have yet been achieved. We can do
much more – and we’ll prove that in the coming years.
Although growth forecasts for key markets in 2013 are rather moderate,
the dynamic in the world vehicle market should significantly pick up in the
long term – mainly driven by China, India and other large emerging markets.
Against this backdrop, we have launched comprehensive product offensives
in all of our divisions: We’re expanding our model portfolio, entering new
segments and fully meeting regional differences in customer needs. In this
way, we aim to be Number One for premium automobiles also in terms of
unit sales by 2020 at the latest. With trucks, we will continue to build on our
current leadership position. Altogether, this constitutes the biggest growth
story in our company’s history: We are growing at a faster pace, on a broader
front and in more markets than ever before.
Four strategic growth themes run through our entire Group and every single
business area:
– the strengthening of our core business in traditional markets;
– the development of new markets (including the requisite expansion
of our research and development, production and distribution networks);
– the continued expansion of our leadership position in “green”
technologies (including electric mobility) and in safety;
– and the introduction of fundamentally new mobility concepts based
on innovation at the interfaces of mobility and digital networking.
Key to all of this is that we don’t want to grow “at any price,” but with sustainable
profitability. That’s why the growth strategies of all our divisions have an
efficiency program as a central component: At our car division, we’re adding
“Fit for Leadership” to “Mercedes-Benz 2020;” Daimler Trucks started the
next phase of our “Global Excellence” growth strategy with “Daimler Trucks #1”.