Ferrari sales are down. Ferrari profits are down. Ferrari stocks are down. What’s not down is its order book, which is busting all the way through 2021.
A headless Ferrari reported on its 2020 results yesterday, noting that shipments were down 10 per cent and revenues down 8 per cent. But that’s not what really surprises me. COVID-19 put Ferrari on hold for seven weeks in 2020, so of course its production and sales would be down.
And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Ferrari’s order book is at “record levels,” as Bloomberg put it:
The order book is at record levels, up 22% versus last year and covering the entire 2021 and beyond, Ferrari CFO Antonio Picca Piccon said.
Of course there will be more people trying to buy Ferraris than ever before! What better time than in the middle of a global pandemic?
Ferrari was recession-proof the last time around, buoyed in part because of the lag between orders and sales, as Car Magazine pointed out in early 2010. Through 2009 it was mostly processing orders from 2006 to 2008.
It’s just fun to see the disconnect between the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer laid so bare. It’s trumpeted out of 12 cylinders. I mean, it’s maybe not as jarring as Jeff Bezos eating an iguana, but it’s a good bellwether for how much more the “haves” have versus the have-nots.
It goes to show that there are things that we understand to be global experiences — climate change, for one, COVID for another — but the way that they play out is far from universal.