The Coronavirus pandemic has put a huge dent in businesses around the world. And certainly, the automotive industry was affected as well. So while the 2020 sales projects might not be met, BMW is showing signs of recovery. According to the BMW Group, 675,680 cars were delivered to customers in the third quarter and that adds up to an 8.6 percent growth year-on-year.

That’s impressive and unexpected and shows that there may still be hope out there for the automotive world. “Thanks to our strong model line-up, we were able to increase our third-quarter sales year-on-year, despite the lasting effects of the coronavirus pandemic,” said Pieter Nota, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, responsible for Customer, Brands, Sales about the situation.

On a year-to-date basis (from January to September) things aren’t that great and that’s understandable. So far, the 2020 numbers are 12.5 percent behind on what was happening during the same first nine months of 2019. Overall, the BMW Group sold 1,638,316 cars.

If you take a closer look though, you’ll start noticing some trends. For example, sales of electrified cars have gone up nearly 50 percent, despite the pandemic. In total, 54,719 such cars have been sold in the third quarter. One of the biggest hits was the MINI Electric.

So far, since 2020 kicked off, the British company sold around 10,000 electrified MINIs around the world. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to offset the downturn MINI models have seen this year. The MINI brand delivered a total of 208,144 (-20.0%) vehicles to customers in the year to the end of September. In the third quarter, MINI posted encouraging sales growth of 1.9 percent.

China remains the biggest BMW market today. Sales of BMW and MINI vehicles added up to 559,681 units for the first nine months of the year; 6.4 percent higher than in the same period of last year. After an encouraging second quarter, recovery continued in China in the third quarter with a significant sales increase of 31.1% to 230,612 units. Per September the sale of electrified vehicles in China increased by 7.4 percent (20.713 units).