Leaders in luxury cars: Bentley and Rolls-Royce both claim the title
10/01/2014
On reporting positive sales results for 2013, UK-based luxury automotive companies Rolls-Royce and Bentley both claimed to be leaders in the market.
In the early part of January, Bentley announced it had delivered 10,120 cars to customers around the world in the course of last year, an increase of 19% on the year before. It said: “[These] results confirm Bentley’s position as the world’s most sought-after luxury car brand.”
Around the same time, Rolls-Royce issued its figures, reporting deliveries of 3,630 vehicles in 2013, slightly up, by 1.5%, on 2012. Its comment was: “These results confirm Rolls-Royce’s clear position as the world’s leading super-luxury brand.”
The claims may appear conflicting, but because they stem from benchmarking exercises carried out separately by the companies themselves, using criteria drawn up internally rather than by any external body, they both stand up.
Bentley has told leatherbiz that its comparisons are against all other automotive companies selling cars at prices starting from around EUR 150,000, which is entry level for its cars. A spokesman told us: “There is no real industry-wide report because it is generally driven by the brands themselves. We judge it against cars in our price point and above and so deem that a fair representation.”
Rolls-Royce, meanwhile, shifts the parameters upwards for its benchmarking and compares its sales against other companies’ starting from a price-point of EUR 200,000. This, it feels, allows it to add the tag ‘super’ to the word ‘luxury’ and claim leadership.
A buoyant luxury automotive market has helped the leather industry greatly in recent years because, even if the volume of cars produced by these famous brands is low, they use a lot of high-end leather produced by some of the best tanneries in the world using some of the best raw material in the world. Rolls-Royce leathershop manager, Andrew Monachan, is on the record as saying each car in his company’s range uses a minimum of ten whole hides in its interior, with some models consuming as many as 15.
But in its examination of the market for cars at EUR 150,000 and above, Bentley concluded that in 2013 the sector as a whole contracted by 6%, which suggests no one in the automotive leather sector can afford to become complacent. The company has calculated that it had a 25% share of the market in 2013, which means it puts the total number of EUR 150,000 (and above) cars delivered last year at 40,480.
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