The planned joint mobility company by Daimler AG and BMW Group is likely to be established in the beginning of 2019. Following the approval of the project by the EU Commission, the two partners are continuing talks with the US antitrust authorities. Completion of the transaction, which was originally planned for 2018 and continues to be pursued by both partners, can no longer be achieved in the remaining weeks of this year.
In this context, the expected significant positive valuation and earnings effects at Daimler Financial Services will be realized in 2019. Accordingly, the earnings forecast for the Daimler Financial Services division has been reduced for 2018. The division now expects EBIT to be significantly lower than in the previous year. The forecast for the Daimler Group’s EBIT in the 2018 financial year remains unaffected and unchanged. As previously announced, the transaction will not have any cash-flow impact on the industrial business.
With their joint venture, Daimler AG and BMW Group plan to combine their mobility services in the fields of car sharing, ride hailing, parking, charging and multimodality, and to create one of the leading providers of innovative mobility services. Each company will hold a 50% stake in a joint-venture model comprising both companies’ mobility services. The two companies will remain competitors in their respective core businesses.
The equally-owned joint venture model is designed to combine services in the following five areas: (1) Multimodal and on-demand mobility with moovel and ReachNow: intelligent and seamless connectivity between different mobility offerings – including booking and payment – will create significant added value for users. It will also offer possible solutions for the challenges of urban private transport; (2) Car sharing with Car2Go and DriveNow: Car2Go and DriveNow operate a total of 20,000 vehicles in 31 major international cities. CarSharing enables better utilisation of vehicles and thus helps reduce the total number of vehicles in cities. More than four million customers already use these CarSharing services; (3) Ride-hailing with mytaxi, Chauffeur Privé, Clever Taxi and Beat: with Europe’s largest taxi app, simply order a taxi or use a licensed driver in France for a ride in the French metropolises. In total, 13 million customers and some 140,000 drivers are already using the modern, practical and fast way of Ride-Hailing with mytaxi, Clever Taxi and Beat or private hire vehicle service Chauffeur Privé. Innovative offers such as mytaximatch, in which people not known to each other share a taxi at a fingertip, make an important contribution to reducing inner-city traffic by eliminating numerous individual trips in the urban space; (4) Parking with ParkNow and Parkmobile Group/Parkmobile LLC: ticketless, cashless on-street parking or help finding, reserving and paying for off-street parking in a garage. Innovative digital parking services reduce the time and the amount of driving involved in finding a parking space. This will reduce traffic significantly, as cars searching for parking spaces currently account for around 30% of road traffic; (5) Charging with ChargeNow and Digital Charging Solutions: easy access (incl. location, charging and payment) to the world’s largest network of public charging stations with more than 143,000 charging points worldwide. Combined with parking privileges in cities, this will support the expansion of electromobility, by helping people get to know this drive technology and integrate it easily into their mobility needs.
Both automobile manufacturers want to shape the future of mobility in order to offer their customers unique experiences and to support partners such as cities and municipalities along the way to achieving sustainable urban mobility. In the future, customers will have a holistic, intelligent and seamlessly linked ecosystem of mobility services at their disposal at the touch of a button. In this way, the two partners are addressing the challenges of urban mobility as well as customers’ requirements and, together with cities, municipalities and other interest groups, are helping to improve the quality of life in metropolises.
