From Swede In Ferrari's Rearview Mirror

An artisanal upstart with Chinese backing moves in on Ferrari’s territory.

- Elisabeth Behrmann and Niclas Rolander

Over the next three years, Ferrari NV aims to double profits by dramatically boosting sales of fast and fabulous cars such as the $1.8 million Monza, the $2.1 million LaFerrari Aperta, and the Purosangue, a sport utility vehicle that promises to be one of the fastest rides on or off the road. To get there, the Italian manufacturer will have to contend with Christian von Koenigsegg.

Since 2002 his company, Koenigsegg Automotive AB, has sold about a dozen handbuilt cars annually for roughly $2 million apiece. He expects to increase his yearly production to hundreds of vehicles by 2022, almost all of them a new model priced around $1 million. And a few years after that, he hopes to boost output to thousands of autos a year—which would make his company a serious threat to Ferrari and other makers of supercars such as Lamborghini and Bugatti. “Some people already choose our cars instead of a Ferrari,” von Koenigsegg says on a tour of his factory on the flat green outskirts of the Swedish town of Angelholm. While the car is “still incredibly expensive, the potential sales volume increases massively.”

Koenigsegg in January signed a $320 million deal with National Electric Vehicle Sweden AB, or NEVS, a Chinese-controlled company that bought the assets of Saab out of bankruptcy in 2012. The partners will start making the new model in 2021 at a sprawling complex of gray and yellow buildings in Trollhattan, three hours north of Angelholm by car (or perhaps less in a Koenigsegg, with its top speed of 249 mph). While the Saab plant today is a virtually empty shell, it once employed 8,000 workers and had the ability to churn out as many as 200,000 vehicles a year.