Korea, new darling of Maybach, Bentley, Rolls-Royce

Foreign exquisite, high-end car brands are eager to offer new and exclusive experiences to their customers in South Korea, the fastest-growing luxury car market in the world thanks to wealthy Koreans’ voracious appetite for rare and expensive cars that make them truly stand out from others.

Mere mass-market luxury cars cannot satisfy super-rich Koreans. Luxury for them is something hardly accessible to the crowd.

To cater to such demands,  a trio of European upscale car brands – Maybach, Bentley and Rolls-Royce – are readying to wow their Korean customers with novel experiences.

Mercedes-Maybach, the top-end marque of Mercedes-Benz with cars starting at around $200,000, is currently building the world’s first Maybach-exclusive showroom with a floor area of 1,983 square meters in Seoul on a plot previously occupied by the old headquarters of Korea’s pioneering entertainment company SM Entertainment Co.

Mercedes-Benz displays Maybach cars together with its regular non-Maybach models in one showroom across the world.

Its world’s first Maybach-dedicated place in Korea underscores the importance of the Korean market to the upmarket car brand.

“Korea is the world’s fastest-growing luxury car market,” said an official of Mercedes-Benz Korea.

The showroom, expected to open in late June, will be managed and operated by The Class Hyosung, Mercedes-Benz’s official dealer in Korea.

ROLLS-ROYCE’S PRIVATE OFFICE AND BENTLEY’S COLLABO WITH ARTS

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars also plans to open its Private Office in Seoul, the first of its kind in the Asia Pacific market excluding China, in the first half of this year.

To be nestled inside Lotte World Tower, Korea’s tallest and the world’s sixth-tallest building, the upcoming privilege space will allow its customers to customize their cars with matchless, unique designs and features with Rolls-Royce designers and engineers, a service unavailable at regular Rolls-Royce showrooms.

Rolls-Royce’s bespoke car the La Rose Noire, which was unveiled last year in the US, is priced at $25 million per unit.

With the opening of such an upscale, exclusive car design house in Seoul, the British high-end car maker is expected to accelerate its inroads into Korea after its first electric vehicle Spectre made its Asia debut in the country in June last year.

Another British top-end car marque Bentley Motors is also set to up the ante to woo wealthy Koreans with insatiable desires to show off exclusivity with rare cars.

Bentley plans a world premiere of the Continental GT’s Korea Limited Edition, designed jointly by Korean contemporary painter Ha Tae-im and Bentley’s Mulliner team, later this month in Korea.

It is priced at 470 million won ($357,000). The price of Bentley’s limited edition designed by the Mulliner team in charge of bespoke designs easily hits about 2.6 billion won per unit.

Bentley pins high hopes on its Korean flagship showroom in Cheongdam, an affluent area in Seoul, which opened in March last year, as it sets a new trend for its flagship showrooms in other countries.

FASTEST-GROWING LUXURY CAR MARKET            

Foreign super-luxury cars are flocking to Korea as Koreans’ demand for high-end car marques has been growing rapidly, leading to the polarization of the country’s import car market.

According to data released by the Korea Automobile Importers and Distributors Association (KAIDA) last year, foreign luxury cars priced at more than 150 million won sold 26,722 units in Korea in 2023, nearly tripled from 2019.

The share of such top-end cars in the total import car sales in the country also quadrupled to 12.2% over the same period.

Mercedes-Benz sold 2,596 units of Maybach in Korea last year, about four times more than 2019. This means that one out of 19,770 Koreans owns a Maybach car.

China was the largest market for Maybach with sales of 17,300 units last year but one out of 81,483 Chinese people owns it, underlining Koreans’ great obsession with the luxury marque.

Bentley sold 810 cars and Rolls-Royce delivered 276 units in Korea last year, growing more than six-fold and nearly two-fold, respectively, from 2019.

But the Korean mass luxury car market has contracted. 

Sales of premium import cars priced between 50 million won and 79 million won stood at 65,612 units last year with a share of 29.95% in the entire Korean import car market, down from 95,679 units with 39.09% in 2019.  

Luxury models of local carmakers such as Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Corp. with similar price tags and EVs by Tesla Inc. are believed to have eaten away the mass luxury foreign cars’ market share, while rich people have rushed to own rare foreign cars with bigger price tags, which are considered must-have status symbols in the country.  

Write to Jin-Won Kim at jin1@hankyung.com

Sookyung Seo edited this article.