AZERBAIJAN - Industry
General Director, Mercedes-Benz
Bio
Yoahim Traenkle began his career at Daimler Domestic Sales, and moved to the main office at Daimler Stuttgart in 1990. Between 1991 and 1994 he was the Sales Manager at Daimler in Moscow, and later became the Sales Monitoring Manager responsible for the Central Asia and Caucasus region. In 2001 he became the Managing Director at Mercedes-Benz Azerbaijan, and in 2006 he became the CEO in the country.
We are very focused on passenger car sales. This is firstly because passenger cars are easier to sell. Secondly, when we started operating here a few years after independence, there was absolutely no commercial vehicle business. The commercial vehicle business only really took off in 2003 when the government started to allow construction works and building on a large scale. Since then the demand for construction vehicles such as dumpers, mixers, and so on has increased. These products are supplied from Turkey, which is also another channel for commercial vehicles. These channels are older and better established, making it difficult to get into the supply chain.
Services are a true strength of Mercedes in Azerbaijan. Our workers are well trained and very experienced. A lot of them speak German, and this makes communication with our headquarters easy. Our staff are also regularly trained, both in Germany and around the world with our parent company Daimler. Our servicemen and mechanics are also sent for regular training to Moscow, Ukraine, or Kazakhstan, and also in country roughly six to seven times a year. The training courses we run here are taught by experts from Germany, as well as mechanical experts from Turkmenistan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. These training courses help to back up the knowledge of our staff, as well as teach them new techniques and initiatives. One such initiative was the implementation of electronic diagnosis with a computer, the data of which are then sent over the internet to head office in Stuttgart, meaning no information is lost.
Several other luxury brands are represented in Azerbaijan. With respect to the competition, I’m mainly watching BMW’s operations. Bentley has also been represented for about two years, and that is a very high end and sophisticated brand. In addition, Porsche has become very popular over the last three to four years. It has a nice outlet in Baku and is performing very well. It is also possible to find exotic brands such as Maserati, but this brand is imported on an individual basis.
The sector will not see year-on-year growth forever, as there is somewhat of a limit to the number of products that we can sell. People who have Mercedes cars in their garages might consider another brand should they want another car, and that is also a factor limiting the sector. In 2007 we experienced our best year in terms of sales in Azerbaijan, selling 500 units. The crisis then affected business adversely. Business since then has begun to recover, and the general number of people who can afford cars is increasing. The increase in the number of cars seen on the streets of Azerbaijan over the last couple years is a result of crisis recovery, and we are optimistic about the future of Mercedes sales in the long term. Our goal is to achieve an average sales rate of 250 passenger cars and 100 commercial vehicles per year.
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