Time to get your 2008 X5 before it is too late
 

BMW of North America is cutting its sales projections for the near and long-term for the struggling market that includes the United States and Canada, as well as reducing the company’s North American staff by nearly 100 employees. Though BMW sales have long grown in the U.S. - 16 consecutive years of steadily increasing sales - the automaker’s New Jersey office has now turned down 44,000 BMWs that were allocated for the North American market for 2009.
Thanks to the slumping economy, not to mention the related weak dollar/euro exchange rate, BMW will send cars formerly allocated for North America and sell them in more profitable markets like Asia, the Middle East, South America and even BMW’s home market in Europe. BMW’s CEO of BMW’s U.S. Holding Corporation recently said that the automaker’s goals include cutting sales expectations by at least 10 percent, reducing new car incentives and cutting up to 90 jobs in North America. These aren’t revolutionary changes for the auto industry in North America - but they are for BMW, which has long enjoyed steadily increasing sales and solid profits.
The automaker hasn’t specified exactly where it expects to see fewer cars or jobs, but it has said that even the BMW X5s built in the company’s Spartanburg, South Carolina, plant will see a reduced number of vehicles allocated to the U.S. market. The X5 has seen a recent perk in sales, but BMW says that it’s not as profitable in the market where it’s assembled as it is overseas.
Sales tactics will also change in BMW’s North American markets. The heavily-marketed December sales push, which has long been a tradition among luxury automakers, will apparently become a thing of the past for BMW. The automaker hopes that by not offering cut-rate deals on leftover ’08s and even ’09s that it will increase profitability.

Old news. About time.

44,000 units cut for '09 is only like 75 a month per state (if you were going to slice up the Lower 48 evenly). Yes that seems like a lot at first but there are on avg what like 5-10 dealers per state ? So that's like 15 cars per dealer per month for all models they sell. I'm just ballparking numbers.

Sign of the times...

does this mean if I wanted a new custom build they wouldn't do it? If not I'm not sure why this affects us the consumer (other than the fewer incentives part).

That would still seem to be a big number, especially in smaller markets which will probably be seeing the most cuts...25% or larger cut in number of cars for those dealerships.

Over the course of the year, if you look at an average of roughly 250,000 cars a year that BMW sells, that means almost a 20% cut across the board...that's huge.

I wasn't sure of units sold and they probably would rather underestimate demand than overestimate. I do feel though that even though BMW says it will not try to more or less get in the game of GM type discounts that the way our economy is shaping up more consumers will really need to be incented to go out and purchase a BMW or other competitors like MB, etc. This lull in the economy is something none of us has ever been in and BMW, etc, might have to re-think their strategy here in the US going forward.

Every company says similar things. I remember GM saying a couple of years ago about how they were going to move away from factory discounts and rebates.

BMW has never really participated that much in discounting in any case, never offering rebates and only occasionally offering dealer incentives.

So I don't see their announcement as being much of a change... and a change they will probably retreat from within six months. I mean the rest of the World's car market isn't going to be doing that well in the next year either.