单选题
{{B}}Passage Four {{/B}} Iris
Rossner has seen eastern Germany customers weep for joy when they drive away in
shiny, new Mercedes-Benz sedans. "They have tears in their eyes and keep saying
how lucky they are," says Rossner, the Mercedes employee responsible for
post-delivery celebrations. Rossner has also seen the French pop corks on
bottles of champagne as their national flag was hoisted above a purchase. And
she has seen American business executives, Japanese tourists and Russian
politicians travel thousands of miles to a Mercedes plant in southwestern
Germany when a classic sedan with the trade mark three-pointed star was about to
roll off the assembly line and into their lives. Those were the good economic
miracle of the 1960s and ended in 1991. Times have
changed. "Ten years ago, we had clear leadership in the market," says Mercedes
spokesman Horst Krambeer. "But over this period, the market has changed
drastically. We are now in a pitched battle. The Japanese are partly
responsible, but Mercedes has had to learn the hard way that even German firms
like BMW and Audi have made efforts to rise to our standards of technical
proficiency." Mercedes experienced one of its worst
years ever in 1992. The auto market's worldwide car sales fell by 5 percent from
the previous year, to a low of 527,500. Before the decline, in 1988, the company
could sell close to 600,000 cars per year. In Germany alone, there were 30,000
fewer new Mercedes registrations last year than in 1991. As a result, production
has plunged by almost 600,000 cars to 529,400 last year, a level well beneath
the company's potential capacity of 650,000, Mercedes'
competitors have been catching up in the United States, the world's largest car
market. In 1986, Mercedes sold 100,000 vehicles in America; by 1991, the number
had declined to 59,000. Over the last two years, the struggling company has lost
a slice of its US market share to BMW, Toyota and Nissan. And BMW outsold
Mercedes in America last year for the first time in its history. Meanwhile, just
as Mercedes began making some headway in Japan, a notoriously difficult market,
the Japanese economy fell on hard times and the company saw its sales decline by
13 percent in that country. Revenues will hardly
improve this year, and the time has come for getting down to business. At
Mercedes, that means cutting payrolls, streamlining production and opening up to
consumer needs—revolutionary steps for a company that once considered itself
beyond improvement.
单选题
The author's intention in citing various nationalities' interests in
Mercedes is to illustrate Mercedes'______.