Demand for financial services

We expect automotive financial services to continue to grow in importance worldwide in 2014. We anticipate that demand for financial services will increase more strongly in those emerging markets in which market penetration is currently low, such as China. In regions with developed automotive finance markets, there will be a further shift in the offering towards enabling mobility at a manageable total cost, with integrated end-to-end solutions, comprising service modules such as insurance and innovative packages of services, and new mobility offerings like carsharing becoming increasingly important. We expect this trend to continue in the period 2015 to 2018.

We estimate that demand for financial services in the mid-sized and heavy commercial vehicles segment will gain momentum in the emerging economies, where financing solutions to support vehicle sales are an essential component of the sales process. In the developed markets, we believe that there will be greater demand for cost-optimized services for mid-sized and heavy trucks in 2014, a trend that will also continue in the period 2015 to 2018.