Friday January 9, 11:11 AM
BMW auto sales fall by 4.3% in 2008
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FRANKFURT (AFP) - Auto sales by the German car maker BMW (Xetra: 519000 - news) fell by more than four percent last year owing to a collapse in global markets in the final months, the group said on Friday.
A statement said the BMW group had sold 1.44 million vehicles from its three brands, BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce in 2008, for a decrease of 4.3 percent from the previous year.
In December, sales plunged by 26.4 percent from the same month a year earlier to 112,423 vehicles, the group said.
Munich-based BMW remained the leading high-end auto maker but suffered bigger sales drops than its main rivals.
On Thursday, the German group Daimler (Xetra: 710000 - news) , which makes Mercedes-Benz autos, posted a drop of 2.8 percent in 2008 to 1.26 million vehicles.
On the other hand, Volkswagen (Xetra: 766400 - news) 's high-end brand Audi (Xetra: 675700 - news) , which has seen sales progress regularly for several years, said it had set a new record with more than one million vehicles, its 13th sales record in a row.
BMW board member Ian Robertson was quoted by the group's statement as saying that "2008 was a difficult year for the auto industry."
The company suffered in particular from its strong presence in the United States, its foremost market ahead of Germany.
Sales fell there by 10 percent on an annual basis to around 303,200 vehicles.
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