An Open Letter to Mercedes-Benz Management

What the market needs now is not a discount policy — it is a system recovery.

Gemutlich Korea · Market Column · May 21, 2026

Lately, I keep witnessing scenes in the imported-car market that should not be happening.

The same vehicle is priced differently depending on where you ask. A car that was "unavailable" yesterday is suddenly "available" today. A car presented as real, in-stock inventory turns out to be unallocated the moment a contract is initiated.

Each salesperson interprets inventory differently, interprets allocation differently, and applies a different price structure. From the customer's point of view, this leads to a single question:

"Is this car actually in a state where I can sign a contract right now?"

I have driven nothing but Mercedes-Benz for fourteen years. I once built logistics ERP systems for a living. Today, I manage nationwide real inventory on a VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) basis myself. So I understand precisely why these scenes occur.

The market is not merely chaotic. The market structure and the operating system are now evolving on two entirely different timelines.

The market has already shifted to an Allocation-Based Market

Many still think of the imported-car market as a Discount Market. The field has already moved on.

The first question in today's market is no longer "How much of a discount can I get?" — it is "Does a contractable VIN actually exist?"

In other words, the market has shifted to a VIN-based Allocation Market: the buyer who places a deposit first, and enters the Allocation Queue first, is the one who takes delivery of the actual vehicle.

Yet while the market structure has moved into the future, the operating system remains in the past. We are running an era of allocation with a system built for an era of discounting.

The first thing I defined when building ERP was the definition of "inventory"

When I built logistics ERP, the very first task was never flashy features. It was unifying the definition of the phrase "we have it in stock."

Sales, the warehouse, and accounting all used the same word — "inventory" — but each pictured something entirely different. Sales meant "what we can sell." The warehouse meant "what is physically in front of us." Accounting meant "what is on the books."

As a result, the numbers never matched. We would take an order believing we had 100 units, only to find that just 40 could actually ship. The rest were already allocated, under inspection, in transit, or on hold.

So I stopped treating inventory as a single number. I attached a State Value to every unit: inbound, under inspection, allocated, or finally available to anyone. Only after that State Value was in place did every department begin to see the same screen and speak the same numbers.

That was the starting point of ERP.

Why Walmart came to dominate global retail

Many attribute Walmart's strength to pricing power. The real core was not price. It was the barcode.

Walmart did not simply attach barcodes to products. It turned every product state — time of arrival, sales velocity, location, availability, turnover — into a real-time State Value. At that moment, Walmart stopped being a retailer run on human intuition and became a data-driven operation.

That is the starting point of ERP: unifying the operating language, so that everyone looks at the same State Value at the same time. This is precisely what is missing in today's Mercedes-Benz market.

When State Value is absent from the system, that state migrates into human memory, phone calls, and messengers. What should be an Operational System becomes a Manual Dependency Structure — an operation that leans on individual capability rather than the system itself.

ROF appears to have been declared before its ERP was built

Watching the global rollout of ROF (Retail of the Future), I keep returning to the same thought.

The philosophy of ROF itself is sound: OEM Direct Governance, Price Transparency, Customer Experience Standardization. The issue lies not in the direction, but in the timing of its operational implementation. In fact, ROF was originally designed so that the VIN is confirmed and shown to the customer at the quotation and reservation stage, and the journey from order to delivery is managed in defined stages.

The problem is that the ROF philosophy was announced to the market before the ERP structure was complete.

What should have existed first is the Operational ERP Layer: VIN Allocation Logic, Pending Contract Queue, Dealer Visibility, Real Inventory Validation, State Value Standardization, and Incentive Governance.

Instead, the philosophy is in the future while operations remain in the past. So what happens in the field? It survives on human memory. On phone calls. On messengers. On the individual capability of each salesperson.

From the perspective of someone who built ERP, this is the most dangerous structure of all — because an empty space in the system is always filled by people, each in their own way.

The data I verified myself reveals the cross-section

From here, this is not speculation. This is real Mercedes-Benz inventory data that I verified and organized on a VIN basis.

■ Mercedes-Benz Immediate-Delivery Real Inventory — Integrated DB · As of May 21, 2026 · Total 5,652 units

Class	2026.05.09	2026.05.21	Net	Note
E-Class	3,028	2,931	-97	Active demand
S-Class	517	267	-250	Sharp drawdown
SL-Class	16	13	-3	—
AMG GT	25	21	-4	—
GLE-Class	385	363	-22	—
GLS-Class	0	10	+10	New arrivals
EQE-Class	133	122	-11	—
EQS-Class	27	22	-5	—
C-Class	84	51	-33	—
A-Class	39	30	-9	—
CLA-Class	35	35	—	Flat
CLE-Class	578	480	-98	—
GLA-Class	27	21	-6	—
GLB-Class	287	272	-15	—
GLC-Class	826	801	-25	—
EQB-Class	230	213	-17	—
Total Real Inventory	6,237	5,652	-585	Physical basis
S-Class (Virtual)	—	4,619	—	System Error
G-Class (Virtual)	—	10,593	—	System Error

※ VIN-verified immediate-delivery real inventory. Stock conditions may change at any time.

While organizing this data, there was a point where my hand stopped. 4,619 S-Class units and 10,593 G-Class units were registered not as physical vehicles, but as virtually generated codes.

Vehicles whose VINs had never actually been generated — cars that do not yet exist in the world — were mixed in under the name "inventory."

From the perspective of someone who built ERP, this is the most dangerous kind of data. When I built systems, I never placed virtual logical inventory and physical inventory in the same column. The moment the two are mixed, sales begin selling what does not exist, and the person waiting for a car receives a promise that cannot be kept.

So I separated these figures from the total and wrote a single phrase in the note column: System Error. I did not soften it — because the softer the wording, the more confused the customer becomes.

And here the core becomes clear: the headquarters system cannot explain to the customer whether this data is valid. So that explanation is being carried out manually by a single person in the field. The actual state of the vehicle a customer is trying to contract is being verified not by the brand's system, but by one individual on the ground.

The most dangerous signal: Incentive Leakage

The most dangerous pattern observed in the field is the way salesperson incentives are effectively being used as cash discounts.

I do not view this as a simple discount issue. I view it as System Leakage. Incentives are meant to operate within a Backend Compensation Layer. When an individual salesperson's incentive begins to surface as a market price variable, the market stops moving around the brand and starts moving around individual survival.

From that moment, customers begin to ask not "Which has the better system?" but "Who adds more cash on top?" And as this repeats, the order of a Premium Brand begins to collapse from within. This is precisely why certain brands, drifting into discount-driven markets, saw their brand value itself erode.

This is not a Korea-only story

The OEM-direct structure Mercedes-Benz is pursuing worldwide is experiencing the same growing pains across global markets.

In November 2025, the Chairman of the Mercedes-Benz Group publicly declared a gradual transition to a structure in which headquarters directly determines vehicle pricing and inventory. The direction is clear. But what happens when the system to support that direction is not ready is already visible in other markets.

In Australia, during the transition to OEM-direct sales, a large number of dealers entered into litigation with headquarters over compensation of roughly AUD 650 million. In Europe, the rollout has been postponed repeatedly — Mercedes-Benz pushing its Spain introduction to the end of 2026 being a representative case, and not the first delay. Other manufacturers are holding back for similar reasons.

The core reason is always the same: in a structure where headquarters directly absorbs inventory and allocation risk, the Operational System needed to control that flow is not yet complete. Meanwhile, the Mercedes-Benz Group's 2025 net profit fell by nearly half year over year.

This is the most common failure pattern in ERP projects. Direction is rarely the cause of failure. More often, collapse comes when the announcement of a direction is made before the system to support it.

If I were to run ROF, I would have designed it entirely differently

Let me be direct. I would not have retained the partner-company structure itself. I would have moved to a globally unified Direct Operation Structure:

• Removal of partner-company Sales Incentive structures
• Full Advisor Salary Standardization
• Removal of quotation authority; introduction of a Kiosk-Based Estimate System
• Automated financial quotation
• Separation of Product Advisor and Delivery Advisor roles
• A nationwide CR (Customer Relation) Team
• Branch-level after-sales (AS) hubs

Because ROF is not a simple change of sales policy — it is, at its core, an Enterprise-Level ERP Transformation. Right now, authority has been centralized while the compensation structure remains distributed. In such a structure, the field inevitably drifts toward indirect discounts, incentive competition, and a game of individual survival.

Cheap product or expensive car — the customer ultimately wants order

People sometimes say, "Walmart is cheap product; Mercedes-Benz is a luxury car — they are different." I do not agree.

Cheap or expensive, what the customer wants is the same: an accurate price, an accurate state, an accurate order of priority, an accurate promise.

The reason a fixed-price system matters is not to control price — it is to allow the customer to trust the system. The higher the price of the product, the more people dislike information asymmetry, prices that shift from person to person, and uncertainty. The more premium the brand, the more visibly order must come first.

What is needed now is not a discount policy, but System Recovery

What Mercedes-Benz Korea needs now is not stronger promotions. It is Operational System Recovery. At minimum, the following must be standardized within the market:

• VIN Allocation Logic
• Pending Contract Queue
• Real Inventory Validation
• State Value Standardization
• Incentive Governance
• Dealer Visibility
• PDI ETA Management

The customer, the dealer, and headquarters must be able to look at the same vehicle State Value at the same time. A market in which inventory is defined differently, allocation is interpreted differently, and price structures diverge by person will ultimately collide head-on with the very direction a Premium Brand is trying to take.

In one line

Premium is not defined by a logo. It is sustained through Operational Consistency. And right now, that consistency is being shaken.

Criticism without an answer is meaningless. A word of caution that comes with an answer is only possible because one genuinely cares about the brand. I would like to be the latter.

Premium is not the structure of selling an expensive product. The moment the customer feels "this brand has order," premium is finally complete.

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This data is provided not to promote any specific vehicle, but to share an objective indicator of the current Korean imported-car market through VIN-based real-inventory flows.

Written by Gemutlich Korea · May 21, 2026
This article is based on the Mercedes-Benz nationwide real-inventory integrated DB, directly managed and verified by Gemutlich Korea, and is updated on a VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) basis.