The Munich based BMW Group continues to perform well within a volatile market environment and recorded new highs to date for sales volumes, revenues and earnings in the third quarter 2015. These performance indicators also improved for the nine-month period, with new records established in each case. With its three brands BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce, the BMW Group is the world’s leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles.

Third-quarter worldwide sales of vehicles rose by 6.9% to 545,062 units (2014: 509,669 units), setting new records for this period. Helped by a tailwind from favourable currency factors, Group revenues climbed by 14.0% to € 22,345 million (2014: € 19,600 million). This strong performance helped push up profit before financial result (EBIT) by 4.3% to € 2,354 million (2014: € 2,256 million).

Thanks to improvements within the financial result, Group profit before tax (EBT) increased by 12.8% to € 2,263 million (2014: € 2,006 million). In the third quarter of the previous year, the financial result had been negatively impacted by a number of items, most notably period-end losses arising on the fair value measurement of derivatives. In line with these figures, Group net profit for the third quarter came in at € 1,579 million, significantly higher than one year earlier (2014: € 1,310 million; +20.5%).

Sales volume of the BMW Group in the first nine months rose by 7.5% to 1,644,810 units (2014: 1,529,880). On top of this came favourable currency factors, which helped Group revenues to grow by 16.4% to € 67,197 (2014: € 57,740 million). Profit before financial result (EBIT) for the nine-month period rose by 6.5% to € 7,400 million (2014: € 6,949 million). Despite the lower result from investments, partly reflecting the ongoing normalisation of the Chinese market, profit before tax (EBT) improved by 4.3% to € 7,114 million (2014: € 6,819) and exceeded the € 7 billion-mark for the first time for a nine-month period. Group net profit amounted to € 4,844 million and was therefore 6.8% up on the previous year's record figure (€ 4,535 million).

The size of the workforce increased by 5.9% compared to the end of the previous year's third quarter. Overall, the BMW Group had a worldwide workforce of 121,316 employees (2014: 114,587 employees) at 30 September 2015. The BMW Group continues to recruit engineers and skilled experts, in order to keep pace with rising demand for BMW Group vehicles, to forge ahead with innovations and to develop new technologies. As of 31 December 2014, the BMW Group had a workforce of 116,324 employees.