BERLIN -- Daimler has seen business stabilize in China after the country ended coronavirus lockdowns, the company's production boss, Markus Schaefer, told Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday.
"In China alone, we sold around 50,000 vehicles again in March. That makes us confident,", Schaefer said in an interview.
Daimler's Mercedes-Benz brand delivered a total of approximately 477,400 passenger cars worldwide between January and March. The report did not say how many of those went to customers in China, who bought 694,200 Mercedes-Benz cars last year, or 29 percent of total sales.
Starting Monday, cars are set to roll off Daimler's assembly line again in Germany. The Sindelfingen and Bremen passenger-car plants will start production of E- and S-Class vehicles.
China is the largest market for the S Class built in Sindelfingen. Normally several hundred vehicles roll off the assembly line in Sindelfingen every day.
"We won't reach this number right away when production starts next week," said Schaefer.
Daimler reported a plunge of nearly 70 percent in first-quarter operating profit on Thursday due to the pandemic and warned that the cash flow it uses to pay dividends would fall this year.
