Bad news. You can’t buy a Ferrari because…

Do you drive a Ferrari?

Now whilst some of you may be lucky enough to say “yes” and some of you may be ambitious enough to say “not yet”, my guess is that most of you will answer “no” to that question.

If you do however happen to be in the enviable position of being about to buy a Ferrari then I’ve got some disappointing news for you in that Ferrari has just announced that they will be limiting the sales of their luxury sports car.

Restricting sales of your product is a pretty unusual approach in business as most companies are keen to sell as many of their products as possible.

It’s quite a clever move by the Italian sports car manufacturer though as the reason they are scaling back on production is to limit the number of new Ferrari cars on the roads and to try to protect the Ferrari brand’s image of exclusivity.

The argument is that the more Ferraris there are on the road, the more common they will be so people won’t see them as prestigious exclusive items and won’t be willing to pay as much for them in the future. Limiting their production will enable Ferrari to keep their prices high.

The number of Ferrari cars sold in the first quarter of this year was up 4% with the company having a net profit of Euro 80m (an increase of 42% on the same period last year).

A very successful start to the year and in an attempt to continue the success the production will be limited to below 7,000 cars in 2013 compared to 7,318 in 2012.

So, sorry to break the news to all of you that were in the process of deciding what colour your new Ferrari was going to be but the good news is that they don’t appear to be restricting the number of Ferrari T-Shirts and baseball hats that are being sold.