The manager wants to broaden the van business of the brand with the star.
(Photo: dpa)
Stuttgart The flick of the tongue gives it away. “I’m not Swabian,” says Mathias Geisen with a smile. In fact, the new head of the Mercedes-Benz van division was born in Essen. Nevertheless, the 43-year-old has spent his entire professional life with the Stuttgart car manufacturer. And the trip to Swabia is far from over. On the contrary. Geisen has big plans.
Specifically, the manager wants to broaden the van business of the brand with the star. To date, Mercedes has sold almost 65 percent of its vans in the EU. This means that the division has a strong “European bias”, Geisen analyses.
He wants to reduce this dependency and increasingly expand overseas and in the Far East. “We have clear growth plans in the USA and in China,” says Geisen. In the United States there is still great potential for commercial customers. “There’s more to do,” says Geisen.
In China, meanwhile, Mercedes is increasingly targeting private customers with brands such as the V-Class. This area, which so far only accounts for a third of total sales, is to be expanded considerably. Especially since the Sprinter panel van is also well received as a motorhome. The different usage concepts could be “balanced out very neatly,” explains Geisen.
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The new “Man of the Van” at Mercedes was previously the strategy chief of the Dax group. In this function, he and CEO Ola Källenius pushed the focus on luxury cars as well as the electric-only orientation, according to which the Stuttgart-based company would like to sell only purely electric vehicles from the end of the decade.
Geisen has a degree in business administration and has worked for Mercedes since 1998. He was sales manager for the G-Class for the van division in the USA and was responsible for the product management of all electric cars and SUVs. His wife also works at Mercedes.
In business, Geisen maintains a relaxed, open management style. He represents a new type of manager at Mercedes. His generation wears sneakers more for convenience than for self-marketing reasons and has hardly any petrol in their veins. “I’m a self-confessed advocate of electromobility,” says Geisen. Electric drives would make sense in delivery traffic over the last mile.
From 2025, vans will also be manufactured on their own electric platform
Mercedes has sold a good 25,000 all-electric vans since 2017. Geisen wants to build on this. From 2025, vans will also be manufactured on their own electric platform. As a result, the cooperation with Renault for smaller vehicles could expire in the medium term.
Geisen keeps a low profile: “I can’t answer that for you now.” His goal, however, is clear: Mercedes should offer the most desirable vans in the world. Unlike his passenger car colleagues, he is not aiming specifically for the luxury segment. That would be inappropriate for the cost-conscious clientele. But Mercedes also places premium demands on vans.
Geisen wants to score points with clever digital services in the future. Electricians should be able to access their wholesalers’ software directly in the car to see which parts are currently available. But classic hardware remains important, such as shelving systems for craftsmen.
Geisen inherited a “super healthy business model” from his predecessor Marcus Breitschwerdt. In fact, the Mercedes van division was able to achieve record results of more than one billion euros in 2021. Sales were also high at 15 billion, although sales of 334,000 units were well below pre-pandemic peaks.
The return adjusted for special effects was 8.3 percent. That’s remarkable. Because in 2019 Mercedes-Benz Vans still wrote a loss of 3.1 billion euros. At that time, a good 2.2 billion euros were due for recalls and legal costs in the wake of the diesel scandal alone. Added to this were write-downs for the flopped X-Class flatbed truck. Restructuring costs were still incurred in 2020. But now the course seems to be right again.
For the current financial year, Geisen is expecting a margin of up to ten percent, with slightly increasing sales. “The order situation is extremely good,” says the manager. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of chips. “The semiconductor problem is not gone,” explains Geisen.
The result: Unfortunately, his unit is currently “not able to meet the enormously high demand”. In addition, there are “major challenges” with fixed costs. Although these have already fallen in double digits since 2019, the company has to save iron. Especially since the competitive pressure is increasing “significantly”.
More: Sprinter manufacturer Mercedes-Benz Vans has a lot of orders – but production is halting.