Ferrari is the kind of company that, culturally, works at its own pace, even if many people are yelling at it to do something different. That is a legacy of Enzo Ferrari, who famously despised his customers because all he wanted to do was race. But it is also what Ferrari’s fans will argue sets it apart: Ferrari will electrify its cars at its own pace, thank you very much. Same goes with making a dumb SUV.
Ferrari can also do this because Ferrari still more or less has a licence to print money. Take its third-quarter results, reported Tuesday.
Ferrari sees adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about 1.52 billion euros (A$2.37 billion) for 2021 after a jump in third-quarter shipments and profit, it said Tuesday. That’s up from an earlier projection of as much as 1.5 billion euros.
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Ferrari reported better-than-expected adjusted Ebitda of 371 million euros in the third quarter. Sales rose to 1.05 billion euros, slightly below analyst predictions.
The company shipped 2,750 cars in the three months through September, a 19% jump compared with the same period last year and an 11% increase over 2019, before the pandemic hit. Ferrari benefited from strong demand in the U.S., first deliveries of the SF90 Spider and the production ramp-up of the Portofino M.
Ferrari first sold 10,000 cars in a calendar year in 2020, and with numbers like this, that will begin to feel routine. And while that is not what anyone in the industry would call volume, it is, for Ferrari, a historically big number, as for years Ferrari only sold a few thousand cars at most.
With the Purosangue SUV (likely) coming next year, you can expect Ferrari’s annual sales to go even higher, and for Ferrari purists to say that the company they once knew is no longer recognisable. They will be both a little right and a little wrong, as the Ferrari everyone thinks they know hasn’t existed for a while.