“Our new corporate representative office in Baghdad will serve as an ideal platform for helping the Republic of Iraq to return back to normal and for introducing our Mercedes-Benz products,” Andreas Renschler, the Daimler Board of Management member responsible for Daimler Trucks & Daimler Buses, said.
One of the tasks the new Office needs to fulfill is to define market opportunities for trucks and buses. In February 2008, Daimler set up a motor vehicle training workshop in Erbil, northern Iraq, to train and qualify workers from the local area.
The announcement comes after Daimler said on Tuesday that their buses “had an absolute record year in 2008, with Daimler Buses achieving its best sales result ever.” Despite that, losses for the German company amount to 82 million euro net loss for 2008, after registering a 1.76 billion euro profit in the last quarter of 2007.
As the usual markets have suffered severe declines in the past few months, the German manufacturer is turning its eyes on the, until now, war ravaged country. If one is to see any advantage in a war, that advantage would be that once the conflict ends, a new, fresh market emerges for those capable of taking the chance. Daimler joins countless others who saw the potential in a country that experienced nothing but war in the past few years.
Google News