Ferrari

Ferrari sells about 13,750 cars a year at an average of roughly €420,000 each, and the important number is not the price but the ratio of demand to supply. The company's stated rule, inherited from Enzo, is to deliver one car fewer than the market wants. In practice that means order books that run eighteen months to two years, allocation of the limited-run models to clients with a purchase history, and residual values that hold in a way no other carmaker's do. The result is that Ferrari has never had to discount, has never had to hold finished inventory, and can spend on personalisation — paint, interior, carbon fibre — that adds roughly a fifth to the revenue of each car at a margin the base car cannot match.

Around the cars sit two smaller engines. Sponsorship, commercial and brand revenue — about €670 million in 2024 — is Formula 1 prize money and sponsorship plus licensing and the merchandise and theme-park business. Ferrari runs the Scuderia as a cost centre that the brand line partly reimburses; the racing is the advertising, and it is the reason a road-car company with no television budget has one of the most recognised marques on earth. The third stream, selling engines to Maserati, has been wound down almost to nothing.

What makes the model unusual is that Ferrari behaves like Hermès rather than like Porsche. Porsche grows by adding models and volume; Ferrari grows by mix, price and personalisation, with unit growth held to a few percent a year and the Purosangue four-door capped at around a fifth of shipments so the SUV does not become what the company is. The 2015 listing on the New York Stock Exchange was Sergio Marchionne's argument that this made Ferrari a luxury company and should be valued as one. The market agreed, and has kept agreeing.

Ferrari's moat is the brand, and the brand is unusually well protected because the company keeps starving it. Every other luxury carmaker — Porsche, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Bentley — has at some point chased volume, and each time the residual values told the truth within a few years. Ferrari has held unit growth to low single digits for a decade and the Purosangue to a fifth of shipments, and a used Ferrari therefore still sells for close to, and occasionally above, what it cost. That residual-value record is the moat in a number: it is why a client will wait two years and pay in full for personalisation, because the car is closer to an asset than a purchase. It is Hermès's Birkin logic applied to a machine.

The second layer is Formula 1. Ferrari is the only team to have raced in every season since 1950, and the Scuderia is a marketing budget that the sport's prize money and sponsors partly fund. No amount of capital lets a competitor buy seventy-five years of Sunday afternoons. The third is process: the limited-series and Icona models — the Monza, the Daytona SP3, the F80 — are allocated by relationship, not by order, and that allocation system, like Hermès's, turns scarcity into loyalty. The best clients buy the ordinary cars to be offered the rare ones.

Where it is weaker: the electric transition. Ferrari's brand is built on the sound and the engine, and its first electric car, the Elettrica, is arriving in 2026 into a market where the luxury EVs that came before it — Porsche's Taycan included — have found demand harder than expected. In October 2025 the company cut its 2030 electric target to a fifth of sales from two-fifths, and the shares fell sharply. That is not a broken moat; it is an honest signal that the company does not yet know what a Ferrari without a combustion engine is worth.

Since the 2015 listing Ferrari's capital allocation has followed one rule: invest in the cars and the factory, pay out most of the rest, and never buy anything. Capital expenditure has risen from roughly €350 million a year at the time of the IPO to around €1 billion, nearly all of it into Maranello — the e-building that opened in 2024 for electric and hybrid production, new paint and personalisation capacity, and the racing department. There has been no acquisition, no second brand, and no attempt to use the balance sheet for anything beyond a modest, steady buyback.

The decision that matters most is the one about volume, and it has been made and remade. Luca di Montezemolo capped production at 7,000 cars in 2013 to protect exclusivity; Sergio Marchionne removed him in 2014 partly over that cap and took shipments to 10,000 by 2019; Benedetto Vigna has held growth to low single digits since. Each of those men could argue his case. The record so far says Marchionne was right that the cap was too low and Montezemolo was right that a cap was needed — the residual values held through the increase because the increase was slow.

The unresolved question is the electric programme. Ferrari has spent heavily on it and, in October 2025, told the market that electric cars would be a fifth of sales by 2030 rather than two-fifths. That is a capital-allocation admission as much as a product one: the company has built capacity for a transition that its clients are not yet asking for, and it will have to earn the return on the e-building with hybrids in the meantime.