In the news: Audi and Volkswagen have recently opened their central depot, the Audi Volkswagen Middle East parts centre at the Jebel Ali Free Zone or Jafza for short. The warehouse facility was worth $10 million contain an initial stock of 40,000 parts including of course the popular lines of auto parts sold by the automaker like the Volkswagen radiator hose and others. The total worth of all these parts is $7 million and is tracked through a dedicated on-site management team.

The opening of the Audi Volkswagen Middle East Parts Centre was celebrated in a grand ceremony at the Jafza site and was attended by prominent personalities like Sheik Majid Bin Saeed bin Rashid Al Nuaimi, Chief of Amiri Court of Ajman Jamal Majid Bin Thaniyah, Vice-Chairman Dubai World and Group CEO Ports and Free Zones World and Salma Hareb, CEO of Jafza and Economic Zones World. Also present at the ceremony were Ernst Hasbach who is the managing director of Audi Volkswagen Middle East FZE and Klaus Hellmann, Board Member, Hellmann Worldwide Logistics.

Bin Thaniyah at his speech during the ceremony has congratulated the effort of the Volkswagen group for their successful endeavors and wished them all more success in their latest venture. Here are excerpts from Bin Thaniyah’s speech: (more…)

In the news: Mercedes-Benz Car Group has announced recently that it has sold 82,000 units of vehicles worldwide comprising of Maybach, Mercedes-Benz and SMART brand passenger vehicles. The said sale is solely for the month of February 2007 however the automaker said that it is lower compared to the 83,800 units it has sold in the same month for 2006.

The first two months of the year, Mercedes-Benz was able to record a sale of 156,500 units of vehicles of which 78,000 are passenger vehicles sold worldwide resulting to an increase of three percent compared to the same month last year wherein the carmaker has sold only 76,100 units. Likewise, the number of vehicles delivered to customers for the first two months of this year has provided the carmaker with an eight percent increase totaling to 151,500 units comparing that to the same period last year with only 140,600 units.

The Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedan is enjoying a favorable reception in the market to think that it’s only a few weeks old. The C-Class have always showed great potentials even before its official launching in the market, around 55,000 advance orders have been placed for the new model in Western Europe alone. The sale of the Mercedes C-Class was particularly strong in February with 1,900 units an approximately twenty-six percent increase compared to the result posted in the same month in 2006. (more…)