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Supply the only barrier to further Mercedes-Benz GLC sales success

The Mercedes-Benz GLC is already leading the premium, medium SUV sales charts; but it could have achieved more than 20 per cent greater sales if we could get our hands on more.


From January this year, the GLC has sold an average of 402 units per month, to a total of 4020 vehicles. This puts the mid-sized Merc a solid 1037 sales ahead of Audi's (soon to be replaced) Q5 and 737 sales in front of the BMW X3.

The biggest competition to the Mercedes SUV has come from Land Rover, with sales of the Discovery Sport just 378 units behind the Benz.

All Australian-market GLC vehicles are built alongside the C-Class Estate at the Mercedes-Benz Bremen factory in Germany. This facility produces GLC for many world markets, but given the United States is scheduled to start building the GLC on home soil for their local market, production allocation for Australian buyers could be set to increase.

CarAdvice spoke with Jerry Stamoulis, Manager of Mercedes-Benz Australia Public Relations and Product Communications, at the local launch of the Mercedes-Benz GLC Coupe, who noted that supply was the only issue slowing down sales of the GLC wagon.

"If you compare the better months of GLC to the poorer months, you'll see what we could do each month [in sales]," Stamoulis said.

January 2016 currently holds the record of 587 sales, so even if an average of 500 cars per month was available, Mercedes would see sales projection rise to well over 5000 per annum.

He added that buyers unable to secure a delivery of a GLC wagon in an acceptable timeframe were moving to other models within the Mercedes-Benz range, including the C-Class Estate and new GLC Coupe.

Given this popularity, would the GLC Coupe sales expect to suffer at the hand of supply? "Considering the strong GLC [wagon] demand since launch, GLC Coupe supply won't be where we would like it to be over the next six months."

While the split in sales between wagon and coupe is still unknown, the larger GLE Coupe makes up over 20 per cent of sales, where the BMW X4 Coupe accounts for over 30 percent of sales of both it and sister SUV, the BMW X3.

Right now, there are three variants available in each of the GLC body styles, with the first AMG, the 270kW GLC43, arriving later this month in the wagon body and February 2017 for the Coupe.

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James Ward

With over 20 years of experience in digital publishing, James Ward has worked within the automotive landscape since 2007 and brings experience from the publishing, manufacturer and lifestyle side of the industry together to spearhead Drive's multi-media content direction.

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