A charging bull

Stephan Winkelmann, president and CEO of Lamborghini, has laid out an ambitious roadmap for all the cars within its fleet to be hybrid models by 2024, followed by an all-new full-electric Lambo before the end of the decade. And before you ask, the V12 combustion engine will continue to breathe

- VARUN GODINHO

It’s difficult to explain away the dream run that Lamborghini finds itself on at the moment as something of a fluke or an event hinged on a whimsical phenomenon such as “pent-up demand”. From January-March 2021, the Italian carmaker recorded its best-ever quarter in terms of sales with 2,422 units delivered worldwide.

That figure was up 25 per cent compared to Q1 2020, when the world hadn’t yet fully grappled with the economic disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was also 22 per cent higher over Q1 2019, when Covid-19 was nowhere on the horizon.

Lamborghini ended 2020 as its most profitable year ever, and the second-best year on record in terms of both turnover and number of cars delivered. It ended the fiscal year 2020 with a turnover of EUR1.61bn, only 11 per cent down over the previous year, and delivered 7,430 cars (second only to the 8,205 units it delivered in 2019) – all of this despite a three-month shutdown of its production lines as a result of the pandemic last year. Lamborghini is keeping up the momentum. “We have an order bank of more than nine months of production, which is very healthy for a company like ours,” Stephan Winkelmann, president and CEO of Automobili Lamborghini, told Gulf Business during a pitstop in Dubai last month.

“The Middle East, including Oman, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon and Bahrain, is our sixth largest market in terms of size. Of these, the biggest market today is the UAE, but the market with the biggest potential is Saudi Arabia.”

It takes nerves of steel then for a carmaker to signal that, right within the middle of a dream run, it is altering course and choosing to go down a risky, somewhat uncertain, path that may or may not lead to the same giddy heights of success it finds itself at the moment.