Dr. Klaus Maier, Manager Sales and Marketing Mercedes-Benz Cars: "The founding of the first five company-owned sales and service outlets forms the basis for the present-day Mercedes-Benz Sales Organisation in Germany. With a total of 34 company-owned branches plus around 600 sales and service partners throughout Germany, we have an efficient nationwide network at our disposal today. At 1200 locations in all, 60,000 employees provide optimum care and support to our customers." As a part of Daimler AG, today the Mercedes-Benz Sales Organisation Germany with its staff of 1200 bears responsibility for the national sales of the brands Mercedes-Benz, smart, Maybach, AMG and Mitsubishi Fuso.
In the outgoing 19th/early 20th century, sales of Mercedes and Benz automobiles were still fully in the hands of independently operating agents. The best-known example is the Austrian businessman Emil Jellinek, who resided in Nice and was the creator of the brand name Mercedes. When car sales declined in 1906 and 1907 as a result of the troubled world economy, DMG relied on a separate sales organisation to enable it to respond on its own to market happenings. At Benz & Cie. in Mannheim, almost simultaneously similar reasons led to the establishment of Benz-owned sales and service outlets.
1909 thus saw the establishment of five company-owned sales and service outlets at once: in Berlin, Frankfurt, Dresden, D?sseldorf and Hamburg. In 1926 Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft and Benz & Cie. merged to form Daimler-Benz AG, carrying on their business from then on jointly. Vehicles are sold both through the company-owned outlets and through independent agents and dealers. This system ensures that all car customers ? those outside the big cities too ? can be reached and creates a service network affording comprehensive coverage. In 1914 DMG already had around 70 sales outlets and agencies worldwide, in New York, London, Cairo, St. Petersburg, Bangkok and other cities.
From 1939 onwards, the Second World War brought car production and sales practically to a standstill. Factories and branches of Daimler-Benz AG were destroyed and had to be rebuilt after 1945. During the "Economic Miracle" period in the 1950s and 1960s car sales boomed. Sports cars like the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing symbolised the freedom of the road. Simultaneously, truck production expanded as goods traffic increasingly shifted to the highway. Buses, vans and the Unimog complemented the product range. The extended product offer caused the demands on the company-owned outlets and the dealers to grow. Daimler-Benz AG responded by setting up the Mercedes-Benz Sales Organisation Germany for the purpose of concerted, brand-adequate marketing of its vehicles. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, the German sales organisation relocated from Stuttgart to Berlin in 1998.