Trends in the markets for financial services

We believe that automotive financial services will be very important for vehicle sales worldwide in 2018. We expect demand to continue rising in emerging markets where market penetration has so far been low, such as China. Regions with already developed automotive financial services markets will see a continuation of the trend towards enabling mobility at the lowest possible total costs. Integrated end-to-end solutions, comprising mobility-related service modules such as insurance and innovative packages of services, will become increasingly important to this. Additionally, we expect demand to increase for new forms of mobility, such as carsharing, and for integrated mobility services including parking, refueling and charging. We anticipate that this trend will also continue in the period from 2019 to 2022.

In the mid-sized and heavy commercial vehicles category, we expect rising demand for financial services products in emerging markets. There in particular, financing solutions support vehicle sales and are thus an essential component of the sales process. In the mature markets, we foresee increased demand for telematics services and services aimed at reducing total operating costs in 2018. This trend is also expected to continue in the period 2019 to 2022.