Rolls-Royce launches £250,000 car as demand rebounds



The boss of carmaker Rolls-Royce has said global demand for luxury vehicles is rebounding despite the pandemic.

Boss Torsten Müller-Ötvös told the BBC that markets in Asia, Europe and the US were now "more or less back to normal".

Mr Müller-Ötvös was speaking at the launch of the new Rolls-Royce Ghost, the company's latest model, which is expected to retail at around £250,000.

He said sales for the first half of 2020 were down 30%, but now "times are starting to become better and better".

Mr Müller-Ötvös described the launch of the new Rolls-Royce Ghost, a complete redesign of the most successful car in the firm's history, as a "seminal moment".

At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Rolls-Royce shut down production for a couple of weeks, while dealerships around the world followed suit.

The slump in sales came after a bumper year in 2019, which Mr Müller-Ötvös described as "the best-ever year in the 116-year history of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars".

"But of course, then Covid happened," he added.

Since then, the firm had seen an "upward trend", he said. "Business is coming back to what I would call far more normal."

The Rolls-Royce boss rejected suggestions that the carmaker was overly dependent on one region for its sales, saying it was "well balanced worldwide".

Although the US was its biggest market and China was important, there was also strong demand in countries such as the UK, which accounted for 10% of its sales, he said

SRC:BBC

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nigeria hunger crises can kill 200 children per day.

Image
  Two hundred children could die each day from hunger in northeastern Nigeria as a result of the ongoing conflict in the country, a humanitarian agency has warned. Up to half of all children under the age of five are acutely malnourished, international charity Save the Children said on Monday, after screening the health of boys and girls in the region between June and October in 2016. The figure could be even worse in areas that are out of reach because of insecurity, according to the report. Children are presenting in desperate conditions and facing severe malnutrition, often in combination with other life-threatening illnesses like pneumonia, malaria and diarrhoea," said Ben Foot, Save the Children country director. "For some cases this may be the second or third time they have fought malnutrition so their immune systems are already severely weakened." Violent attacks on civilians since 2009 by the armed group Boko Haram have affected almost 15 milli
Read more

Cardi B explains why she 'drugged and robbed' men

Image
Cardi B has defended herself after a video resurfaced of her saying she drugged and robbed men who wanted to have sex with her while she worked as a stripper before finding fame. The rapper faced criticism after the three-year-old Instagram live video recirculated on social media. "Whether or not they were poor choices at the time, I did what I had to do to survive," she wrote on Tuesday. "I never claimed to be perfect or come from a perfect world." The original video was made as her career was starting to take off and was her response to someone who said she didn't deserve success because she hadn't put in any work. "Nothing was handed to me. Nothing," she said in the video, before going on to reveal that she would invite men to a hotel before drugging and robbing them. In response to the furore, she wrote on Instagram that she had been talking "about things in my past right or wrong that I felt I needed to do to make a living&quo
Read more

GameStop To Introduce Installment Payment Plans for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S

Image
Preparing for the release of the Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X/S, GameStop is now preparing to launch an installment payment plan program for the next-gen consoles. Revealed in a series of internal documents, the American video game, consumer electronics and gaming merchandise retailer is looking to help offer an alternative way to own the systems. GameStop is currently looking into installment plans, direct layaway and rent-to-own plans. Installment plans would be offered through third-party companies like Quadpay and Klarna, requiring customers to split their purchase into four payments over six weeks with no interest. Layaway would see customers pay small installments over a certain period of time to clear the full payment before they receive their consoles. While the rent-to-own plans would let customers rent the new consoles for an upfront fee, with the rest of the cost paid over a 12 month period. Customers can then fully pay off the cost to own a console or retu
Read more