Selling to Mercedes-Benz Group

Mercedes-Benz Group spent 9,680 million euros on research and development in 2025 and employed 164,120 people at 31 December 2025, on revenue of 132,214 million euros from 1,801,291 cars and 359,136 vans.

Those are board-deck numbers. Here is the one that matters. Under NEXT LEVEL PERFORMANCE, Mercedes targets material cost savings of around 8 percent until 2027, rising to 10 percent, and production cost per unit down 10 percent from 2027 against 2024. If Mercedes buys what you sell, you are not a growth line. You are a line somebody is measured on shrinking, and every meeting you get is taken by someone carrying that target.

How the buying process actually runs

There are two doors and the obvious one is not for you. You can only register on the Mercedes-Benz Supplier Portal if you already hold a valid supplier code, and access is granted by a Portal Manager inside your own company rather than by Mercedes. With no existing relationship, your route is the Initiative Application Process through the supplier database, and Mercedes says plainly that not every application leads to a cooperation.

That public route is for non-production material only, meaning no vehicle components. There is no published self-service front door for production material at all, so a vendor who files an initiative application for a vehicle component has used the wrong door and will not be told so. A valid D-U-N-S number is a hard gate: without one, the Group says, an application is not possible.

Since the beginning of 2026 there is one purchasing organisation, not two. International Procurement Services, which held non-production material and services, and Procurement & Supplier Quality Mercedes-Benz Cars and Vans, which held production material, merged into one unit, Procurement & Supplier Quality. Account plans built on the old split are out of date.

The e-procurement system is proQ, not SAP Ariba. Mercedes built its own: proCure for priced contracts, proFrame for unpriced ones including multi-year supply and non-disclosure agreements, and proSource for requests for quotation. Document exchange runs through eAccept, which makes purchasing documents binding without a signature. proQ replaced the legacy GLOBUS and eDocs, and no Mercedes-owned source names Ariba.

The contractual bar is published and higher than most sellers expect. The Mercedes-Benz Special Terms 2025 require a quality management system certified to IATF 16949. For cyber-security-relevant delivery items they require TISAX Level 3 at all relevant locations, and the same along your own supply chain, alongside ISO/SAE 21434 and Automotive SPICE. Production material suppliers to Cars and Vans need certified ISO 14001 or EMAS and ISO 50001 systems. VDA 6.3 is an audit right Mercedes reserves over your processes, not a certificate you produce, so it arrives on their schedule.

And there is a signature about 2039. The Ambition Letter is mandatory for all new contracts: suppliers to Cars and Vans guarantee that from 2039 they will supply only net carbon-neutral products, and one who does not sign is not considered for new awards. The Responsible Sourcing Standards are contractually binding and must be cascaded upstream.

Who owns what, so you know where your deal belongs

You will not be selling to these people. Their remits tell you which of the three reported divisions, Cars, Vans and Financial Services, your deal sits in, and whose targets it must survive several levels down. The Board of Management has only eight members, so each remit is wide. Note too that Mercedes-Benz Mobility AG merged into Mercedes-Benz AG on 31 December 2025, so a CRM record naming Mobility needs rewriting.

Two details are easy to get wrong. Mercedes-Benz Group has no chief information officer on its Board of Management. Enterprise technology sits with Britta Seeger, beside People and the Labour Director mandate, so an enterprise software deal and a workforce question share a board sponsor. And since 1 December 2025 development and procurement sit in one seat under Jörg Burzer. At most carmakers those are separate boardrooms. Here the engineering judgement and the commercial squeeze have the same owner.

Board composition from Mercedes-Benz Group AG's own governance pages, verified 12 September 2026. Senior roles change. Verify at source before using any name.

Why you cannot sell into Mercedes from the bottom

NEXT LEVEL PERFORMANCE, launched at the Capital Market Day on 20 February 2025, contributed more than 3.5 billion euros to EBIT in 2025. It takes global passenger car capacity to around 2.2 million units by 2028 and targets fixed costs down 10 percent from 2024 to 2027, on top of roughly 25 percent taken out since 2019. First-half 2026 free cash flow carried an outflow of approximately 1.1 billion euros for severance payments, and the Group began further intensifying productivity measures in June 2026, focused on its German locations.

Read that as a seller, not as news. A manager three levels down cannot sign a new external cost line into that plan. The friendliest replies cold outreach produces come from exactly the level with the least standing to award anything.

The layer that matters sits below the published names

Purchases are sponsored by commodity buyers inside Procurement & Supplier Quality, by engineering leads across around 30 production sites on four continents, and by platform owners in the software subsidiaries. That last group is where Mercedes differs from a volume carmaker. Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation employs approximately 2,500 people and is described by the Group as the largest tech company within Mercedes-Benz Group AG. MBition has more than 650 employees, Mercedes-Benz.io more than 500. MB.OS, the in-house chip-to-cloud operating system, launched with the new CLA, with named partners including Google, NVIDIA, Momenta and Microsoft.

So one capability can have an owner in Stuttgart, another at MBition in Berlin, another at a plant, and a commodity buyer who holds the category regardless. Mapping the real buying committee is most of the work, which is why multithreading is not optional here.

The Supervisory Board is a published second-degree map

Mercedes-Benz Group AG has two boards and nobody sits on both, so a pitch aimed at the board is aimed at nothing. Under German co-determination law the Supervisory Board has twenty members, ten elected by shareholders and ten employee representatives. Dr Martin Brudermüller chairs it; Ergun Lümali, Chairman of the Corporate Works Council, is Vice Chairman.

It matters more here than at most German industrials: there is no controlling family or state block to route around it. At 30 June 2026 the largest disclosed holders of the 962,903,703 shares were BAIC Group at 9.98 percent, Li Shufu through Tenaciou3 Prospect Investment Limited at 9.69 percent and the Kuwait Investment Authority at 5.33 percent. No single shareholder can hand you anything, so the seats are the map, and this bench leans unusually towards technology and services:

• Dr Martin Brudermüller, Chairman. Formerly Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of BASF SE, 2018 to 2024. Now a director of Accenture plc and Chairman of BITZER SE.
• Ben van Beurden, formerly Chief Executive Officer of Shell plc, 2014 to 2022. Now Senior Advisor to KKR for its Climate Fund and Chairman of Clariant AG.
• Timotheus Höttges, current Chairman of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom AG and of T-Mobile US. Audit Committee.
• Liz Centoni, current Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Cisco, and a director of Workday.
• Olaf Koch, Chairman of the Audit Committee and Managing Director of Zintinus GmbH. Formerly Chief Executive Officer of METRO AG, 2011 to 2020.
• Dr Doris Höpke, currently a director of Airbus SE. Formerly on the Board of Management of Munich Re, 2014 to 2022.
• Dr Katharina Beumelburg, current Chief Sustainability and New Technologies Officer at Heidelberg Materials AG, formerly at SLB and Siemens Energy.
• Dr Rashmi Misra, current Group Chief AI and Data Officer at e&, the Emirates Telecommunications Group, formerly a General Manager for AI at Microsoft.
• Marco Gobbetti, Executive Administrator of Aeffe S.p.A., formerly Chief Executive Officer of Salvatore Ferragamo and of Burberry.
• Stefan Pierer, Managing Director of Pierer Konzerngesellschaft mbH and Chairman of Pankl Racing Systems AG.

The employee bench is just as checkable and almost nobody works it. Barbara Resch, IG Metall District Manager for Baden-Württemberg, also sits on the supervisory boards of Daimler Truck Holding AG and ZF Friedrichshafen AG, and Nadine Boguslawski, Head Treasurer of IG Metall, on that of Robert Bosch GmbH.

Read that as a seller. If anyone in your network is senior at Accenture, Cisco, Workday, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile US, Airbus, Clariant, KKR, BASF, Bosch, ZF or Daimler Truck, there is a checkable two-hop path to a Mercedes-Benz supervisory board member. Finding which already exists inside your own company is what a relationship intelligence platform is for.

Other routes in

The Daimler Truck pool. Daimler Truck Holding AG was spun off and listed on 10 December 2021, with Mercedes retaining around 35 percent at the time and now selling that stake down. Decades of shared payroll walked out of the same buildings, and those people still know who stayed. There is no formal alumni programme to work, so plan without one.

Tier one suppliers already holding part numbers. They are inside the IATF and TISAX system you are trying to enter and can route you to the engineering team with the problem, often willingly, because it makes their own scope stickier.

And then you have to get to your own connector

This step kills more introductions than the external ask does. If the best path runs through one of your own directors who knows someone at Accenture or Deutsche Telekom, you still have to get them to prioritise it and spend a piece of a relationship built over years. Ask badly, or twice in a quarter, and you will not be asked again.

Three rules for the introduction itself

Ask for the category or the site, not the Group. "An introduction to whoever holds the enterprise software category inside Procurement and Supplier Quality" is actionable. "An introduction to Mercedes" is not.

Write the blurb your connector will forward. They will not write your pitch, and what goes out will be worse than what you would have sent. The forwardable blurb is the whole craft.

A warm path starts the clock, it does not skip it. You still need the D-U-N-S number, IATF 16949, TISAX Level 3 where cyber security applies, ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 for production material, a signed Ambition Letter and a Supplier Ambition Rating. What the introduction buys is a real conversation with someone who owns the problem and the budget, months earlier than the queue would give it.

See the warm paths into Mercedes-Benz Group

Everything above describes the problem: development and procurement under one board seat, and no CIO. What it does not tell you is which of your own relationships already reaches inside. That is a question about your network, not theirs, and it is the one most teams answer from memory.

Boomerang maps the warm paths your company already has into accounts like Mercedes-Benz Group, across your team, your customers, your board and investors, and your partners. It then drafts the ask, routes it through the right connector and tracks it to a booked meeting. Book a 15-minute walkthrough and see it run against your own target accounts.