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Mazda North American Operations CEO Tom Donnelly sits down with Market Domination Overtime Hosts Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton to talk about how the Japan-based automaker plans to grow its presence in the US market.
Mazda is expected to reach 400,000 deliveries in the US in 2024 and expects that number to grow in 2025. Donnelly tells Yahoo Finance the 2025 US sales target is “north of 450 [thousand] at this point.”
The executive notes, “Obviously, we need to keep an eye on what's happening in the overall industry” as part of the company’s market-based approach. He says there are two catalysts that “are going to continue to spur our growth.” The first is the company will introduce the CX 50 hybrid, assembled in the US.
The second growth catalyst is “a new brand campaign, ‘Move and Be Moved.’” Donnelly says, “It really addresses the opportunity that we saw in terms of the building blocks that we've put in place over the last couple of years. So we feel like we've got the product piece pretty well dialed in together with our retail partners. We've invested heavily in the experience that we provide our customers, and we're getting very good accolades for that from both our dealers and our consumers.”
And Tom, you talked about 400,000, um, that that you're going to reach that milestone in the US, um, for vehicle deliveries this year. What then? Uh, what do you guys have a target for 2025? How much growth are you aiming for and how do you get there?
Yeah, absolutely. So, we do have a target, and it's higher than 400,000. Um, I would say it it's north of 450 at this point. But obviously, we need to keep an eye on what's happening in the overall industry. So we expected a 4% growth this year. It's not, it's not going to achieve that level. It's relatively flat. One of a couple or, I would say two of the catalysts that are going to continue to spur our growth are in a couple weeks we're going to introduce our first hybrid, uh, our CX-50 hybrid, which we assemble in our plant in Alabama. So we're really excited about that. We've gotten very positive reaction from our dealer partners about that product. The other thing is, just a couple weeks ago, we introduced a new brand campaign, move and be moved. And it really addresses the opportunity that we saw in terms of the building blocks that we've put in place over the last couple years. So we feel like we've got the product piece pretty well dialed in. Together with our retail partners, we've invested heavily in the experience that we provide our customers and we're getting very good accolades for that from both our dealers and our consumers and our owners. The third piece has really been about clarifying what the Mazda brand stands for. So we have great brand awareness, but really a little bit of uncertainty about what Mazda represents. So move and me, move and be moved, excuse me, is our representation of the brand and the effect that it has on you, about living with intention. So we've gotten very positive feedback and it's exceeded any of our internal benchmarks by about 30 some odd percent thus far in really about four to five weeks in the market.
Got you. Tom, good to catch up with you. Thank you.
All right. Thank you very much.
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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.