Audi managed to sell close to 1,575,500 vehicles in 2013, setting a new record for the brand and achieving a 1.5 million unit sales milestone two years ahead of schedule. Audi’s sales success was on the back of strong demand for its latest A3 compact family and its SUV and crossover range, which helped bring in plenty of new customers. The automaker boasts that over the past four years more than 600,000 newcomers to the brand have been registered.
“We set an important milestone for Audi in the past year: We achieved our intermediate strategic goal of 1.5 million deliveries two years earlier than planned, and in fact comfortably exceeded it,” Audi CEO Rupert Stadler said in a statement. “This means that in the past four years alone, Audi has attracted more than 600,000 new customers.”
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Audi’s sales in 2013 were up 8.3 percent on the previous year’s total of 1,455,100 vehicles. Major growth drivers over the past year were Audi’s three biggest export markets, all of which reported double-digit growth: with China up 21.2 percent, the U.S. up 13.5 percent, and the U.K. up 14.9 percent. In the U.S. Audi sold 158,061 vehicles, making it the sixth most popular brand for luxury autos.
Audi’s home market of Germany was still its biggest customer, with 250,025 sales being registered there over the past year. Audi couldn’t escape Europe’s economic downturn, however, with the German sales figure coming in 5 percent lower than last year. Sales were also down in many other European countries: with France down 8.3 percent, Italy down 6.1 percent and Spain down 3.2 percent. Audi sales for the European region as a whole were down 0.9 percent from 2012.
Audi’s new target is to achieve 2 million annual sales by 2020. To reach this target it will invest $30 billion over the next five years and introduce 11 brand new models, increasing the size of its fleet to 60 different models.
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