It employs just over 1,000 people and sells about 2,000 cars every year. But Lamborghini is amongst the most coveted set of wheels in the world.
In a discussion for CNBC-TV18's Forbes India Show, Menaka Doshi spoke with the marquee carmaker's veteran CEO, Stephan Winkelmann -- a political scientist by education and a car salesman by profession. He is also said to be one of the world's best dressed CEOs.
Below is the transcript of the interview on CNBC-TV18.
Q: Belated set of congratulations. In March last year, Lamborgini completed its 50th year in existence. Can you look back for us and tell me what some of the highlights of the last 50 were and what you expect will be the challenges and opportunities for the next 50?
A: The last 50 years were the ones where we established the brand. The bigger thing is the brand and the products. The founder Ferruccio Lamborghini was incredible because he had a big success at the very beginning with the Miura which was immediately a car which made the brand a hit. From there onwards, it was that not everything we did was easy but if I have to highlight the two things, then it's all about products and it is all about the brand.
Being a luxury brand it is always selling less than demand and for the next 50 years I am confident that the super sports car market will stay, will survive even though we have a lot of challenges especially in the next years in front of us.
If it was evolution in the past decades for the automotive industry, it would be a revolution for the next decade. So for us it means to bring the CO2 emissions down by maintaining the DNA of Lamborghini.
Q: I want to talk about a few more current challenges and opportunities. To begin with your assessment for the super sports car market in the world currently, given what the global economy looks like right now. So if you can talk us through what 2014 sales have looked like and what you expect will be the outcome of 2015?
A: The economy worldwide in 2014 is lights and shadows and this is where it is also for super sports car company like Lamborghini. We have an advantage; we are growing in number of sales. This is because of the perfect image we have almost globally and also because we have a very new model range.
In fact, we launched in March this year in Geneva, we launched the new Huracán, our newest car. It is a V10 car with 5.2 litre capacity.
So at the end of this year we will exceed the sales we had in 2013. We are guessing about 20 percent more and if the economy holds, giving us the right tailwinds, we will even do better in the year 2015.
Q: How has the Huracán worked out for you, if you can throw some light on the kind of sales numbers it's seen?
A: So far we have collected more than 3,000 orders. We are a car company which is selling a bit more than 2,000 cars a year. So you imagine how important this is for us and this is a good sign for the Huracán and for the company because the Huracán is a car which really is easy to drive on the road and it is spectacular and very fast on the race track.
Q: The US and China are two of your biggest individual markets. What do you make of the ongoing recovery in the US and the demand situation in China because they are considerable concerns now over the growth rates in China and whether they will maintain the averages that we have seen over the last decade or so?
A: The US is by far our largest market and it is also going to be the largest market in 2014. So we are benefitting from the recovery and we have a very good situation there.
In China, it is a bit different. The market is stable in terms of the super sports car segment. It is not growing as it was at the end of the last decade, but we have a good opportunity with our model range to have increasing sales also in the Chinese markets in 2015.
Q: These Huracán orders that you spoke of; 3,000, How many years will it take you to fulfil these orders. What is the waiting time like for a Huracán?
A: We are increasing our capacity in terms of production because we were foreseeing that this model will have a great success. So we will increase our production slowly but steadily because we want to have a high quality standard and all the orders we collected in the year 2014 will be delivered in the year 2015.
We hope that this is going to be a continuous success and for Huracán we have a lot of derivatives, we will launch in the years to come. So we are planning a lot for this car, like also the Aventador.
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