I’ve received some great reportage from Finland today and it’s really encouraging to read what’s happening in some of these smaller Saab markets that we don’t normally get to hear about.
Of course, Saab has a great association with Finland over the years and I’ve personally owned three or four Finnish built Saabs, including my old Lightning Blue Saab 9-3 Viggen and the Monte Carlo I’m driving right now.
I’d like to pass on my thanks to Marco H for the info he’s passed on today. I hope you all find it as encouraging as I have.
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Tuulilasi (translated as windshield) is one of the big car magazines in Finland. It is known for reporting the car market from a honest and professional point of view.
Recently they have carried news about the Finnish Saab importer, which will change from GM Finland to Saab Automobile (Spyker owned). Also is stated that the Director will be Antti Foudila, who was the Country Director of Saab within GM Finland as well. All the 17 dealers will continue as Saab dealers under the new importer. All these dealers are already working with several other brands as well.
The goal for 2010 will be to sell 400 of the 9-3 models and 300 of the new 9-5. For 2010 that would lead to a market share of 0,7% in Finland in a projected sale of 100,000 cars totally in the country.
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I also want to add an old article from 13th of Jan this year in a Financial web newspaper called Taloussanomat.
It was reported that since the wind down started, almost all the new Saabs in stock had been literally torn away from the dealers in Finland. The dealers CEO Jari Nordman said that in the beginning of 2010 they had around 50 new Saabs in their stocks and in barely 2 weeks they were down to 20 unsold Saabs and were still counting.
Many of these new Saabs had been bought by the local Saab Club members and this was confirmed from the Club chairman Juha Lehtonen; also mentioning that most of these cars were becoming daily driving cars. One point mentioned about this sales peak was that many new cars in Finland were sold with up to a 15% discount as the 2009 was a buyers year anyway (especially with cash).
Also mentioned in the article was that there were more people than ever wanting to join the Finnish Saab Club and Juha Lehtonen was not sure if the total member count had reached over 3000 at the writing of the article but people were joining the club at a rate of 2 new members per day at that time. Probably exceeding the amount of memberships in the Finnish Mercedes Benz club.
In the end of the article is mentioned that Finland has about 47.000 Saabs registered, of which the oldest are from the 50’s.
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