Despite the contraction of the luxury car market in 2024, BMW Group Thailand remains strong, maintaining its market leadership position. The company has announced its 2025 plans, which include expanding its dealer network, launching new electric vehicle (EV) models, and enhancing services to maximize customer satisfaction.
Bangkok – Amidst economic challenges and the overall contraction of the automotive market, BMW Group Thailand has maintained its leadership in the premium car market for the fifth consecutive year. The company has announced its business plan for 2025, which focuses on expanding its dealer network, launching a variety of new products, and further enhancing the customer experience.
In BMW Group Thailand’s annual press conference, Mr. Rene Gerhard, President and CEO, BMW Group Thailand, revealed the company’s performance in 2024 and its business direction for 2025. He stated that although the past year was challenging for the global automotive industry, including Thailand, where the passenger car market contracted by 23% and the premium car market by 24%, BMW Group Thailand still outperformed the market, with sales declining by only 11.7%.
“Last year was a very challenging year, not only for us but for the entire automotive industry,” said Mr. Gerhard. “We faced economic uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, and that led to a shift in customer behavior. However, we still maintained our number one position in our segment.”
Success Amidst Challenges:
The key factors driving BMW Group Thailand’s success are its flexibility in adapting, innovation, and customer trust, especially in the electric vehicle (EV) segment, which showed remarkable growth of 10.7% in 2024, reflecting the increasing demand for alternative energy vehicles.
While the BMW and BMW Motorrad brands experienced a slight decrease in sales, the MINI brand saw impressive growth of 7.6%, particularly the new MINI Cooper SE and the latest model that was recently launched (the model name was not specified in the article but was mentioned).
2025 Business Plan: Network Expansion – New Car Launches – Service Enhancement
For 2025, BMW Group Thailand plans to expand its business in several areas:
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Dealer Network Expansion: Increase the number of “fully-fledged dealerships” across all brands (BMW, BMW M, MINI, and BMW Motorrad), with the goal of having 35 dealerships by the end of 2025 (up from 29 in 2024).
- BMW: Increase from 28 to 29.
- BMW M: Increase from 5 to 8 (as part of BMW dealers).
- MINI: Increase from 13 to 16.
- BMW Motorrad: Increase from 14 to 15.
- New Dealerships:
- BMW: Performance Motors Ayutthaya
- BMW M: Europa Motor, Barcelona Motors (Vibhavadi), Amorn Prestige (Rangsit)
- MINI: Europa Motor, Barcelona Motors Bangkae, Performance Motors Ratchapreuk
- BMW Motorrad: MotoGroup (Rama V)
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New Product Launches: Introduce a variety of new car models to meet the needs of all customer segments, especially in the EV segment, which currently offers 12 models across the three brands.
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Customer Experience Enhancement: Focus on maximizing customer satisfaction by improving showrooms and service centers (with plans to renovate 13 locations in 2025), offering exclusive experiences such as driving events both domestically and internationally, and developing the My BMW & My MINI Finance applications to facilitate customer access to information and services.
BMW Financial Services: Supporting Customers Amidst Household Debt
Ms. Jariya Koonlinthip, Chief Executive Officer, BMW Financial Services Thailand, discussed the company’s performance in 2024. She said “Last year was challenging for the entire automotive industry. The slight decrease in BMW Thailand’s sales also affected our lending. However, overall, we still performed quite well. For every two BMW cars sold, one customer uses our financing services, whether it’s for BMW, MINI, or BMW Motorrad, which represents about 50% of total sales.”
“In addition, last year we launched a new business, an insurance brokerage, which was well-received, with sales exceeding 60% of our total loans.”
“Another group of customers who trust our services is the corporate or corporate customer segment, which has a high loan penetration rate of almost 17% of all BMW Thailand corporate customers.”
“In addition to loans and insurance, we also focus on facilitating customers through digital channels. Our customers can download the My BMW and My MINI Finance applications to access loan information, check payment amounts, view receipts, and manage their information themselves without having to contact the call center. Making it more convenient and faster for customers.”
Our success last year was partly due to our collaboration with BMW Thailand in organizing various attractive sales promotion campaigns, whether for BMW, MINI, or BMW Motorrad. Throughout the year, we had almost 30 campaigns, focusing on special interest rates or low down payments to make it easier for customers to own a BMW.
In addition, we also offer comprehensive services that meet the needs of our customers, whether it’s installing Wallboxes for charging electric vehicles, providing car insurance, and BMW Service Inclusive (BSI) after-sales service that extends customer coverage.
“And most importantly, we place great importance on customer satisfaction. Our customer satisfaction survey results have grown steadily over the past 5 years and are in the Top 3 compared to the Asia-Pacific region, reflecting our commitment to providing the best products and services.”
“We continue to enhance the customer experience by providing special benefits and activities such as participation in driving experiences both domestically and internationally.”
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
“On the internal operations side, we have adopted new technologies to increase work efficiency, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which allows us to check data, prepare reports, and pay dealers quickly.”
“We have implemented an automatic loan approval system, which reduces loan approval time from many hours or sometimes days to just a few minutes. Although we initially started using this system cautiously due to the household debt situation, we are confident that this system will help us serve customers faster and more efficiently in the future.”
“Another advancement is that Thai law now supports digital contract signing. Customers can sign contracts via iPad with our staff. No need to use paper documents anymore. The initial response was satisfactory. Customers are quite interested in digital technology.”
“For future plans, we have several major projects to improve our work system, focusing on loan approval systems, customer database management systems, and debt tracking systems so that we can respond to customer needs more quickly and accurately.”
“Even though the Thai economic situation this year is challenging, BMW Financial Services Thailand is ready to develop and continuously improve operations to provide the best service to our customers.”
BMW Makes History! NPS Hits Record High
BMW Group Thailand announced a significant achievement with a record-high Net Promoter Score (NPS) in 2024, both in sales and service, reflecting its commitment to providing the best customer experience and reaffirming its leadership in the premium car market.
Data revealed at the annual press conference showed a continuous growth trend in NPS scores since 2020. In 2024, the NPS score for sales reached 95 points from over 12,000 customers, and the NPS score for service was 93 points from over 56,000 customers, the highest figures ever recorded.
This success is the result of BMW’s continuous customer-centric strategy, including developing products that meet customer needs, expanding the dealer network, improving showrooms and service centers, and creating special activities and experiences for customers.
Compared to 2020, when the NPS score for sales was 87 points (from over 6,200 customers) and the NPS score for service was 80 points (from over 31,000 customers), it is clear that BMW has made significant progress, both in terms of satisfaction scores and the number of customers, confirming its success in building long-term customer relationships.
In addition, the significant increase in the number of customers participating in the NPS survey reflects BMW’s efforts to listen to customer feedback and continuously improve its products and services to meet customer expectations even better in the future.
BMW Optimistic! Expects Luxury Car Market to Rebound in 2025 After Motor Expo Bookings Surge
Mr. Rene Gerhard, expressed confidence in the outlook for the premium car market in 2025, forecasting slight growth, even though the market has contracted for the past two years. Mr. Gerhard said, “We expect slight growth, especially in the premium car market.”
The factors supporting Mr. Gerhard’s positive outlook are the government’s economic stimulus measures, especially the program that helps consumers who are having trouble repaying their loans (“we help program”), which Mr. Gerhard believes will be a key factor in stimulating market demand or at least stabilizing the market. “I think this is a good initiative and will help drive market demand,” he said.
In addition, Mr. Gerhard mentioned BMW’s success at the Motor Expo in December last year, where the company had record-high car bookings in the past 6 years. “During the Motor Expo, we had a very good momentum. It was the highest booking ever,” said Mr. Gerhard, adding that the company will try to maintain this momentum for future auto shows.
Mr. Gerhard concluded by encouraging everyone to look to the future with optimism, saying, “We have to look to the future with a little bit of positivity because, as they say, it can’t always rain. So let’s see that after two consecutive years of declining market, it will grow again.” This reflects BMW’s hope and determination to drive the business to grow further.
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