Iris Rossner has seen eastern German customers weep for joy when they drive away in shiny,

new Mercedes—Benz sedans. "They have tears in their eyes and keep saying how lucky they are," says Rossner, the Mercedes employee responsible for post-delivery celebrations. Rossner has also seen the French pop corks on bottles of champagne as their national flag was hoisted above a purchase and she has seen American business executives, Japanese tourists and Russian politicians travel thousands of miles to a Mercedes plant in southwestern Germany when a classic sedan with the trademark three-pointed star was about to roll off the assembly line and into their lives. Those were the good old days at Mercedes, an era that began during the economic miracle of the 1960s and ended in 1991. Times have changed. "Ten years ago, we had clear leadership in the market," says Mercedes spokesman Horst Krambeer, "But over this period, the market has changed drastically. We are now in a pitched battle. The Japanese are partly responsible, but Mercedes has had to learn the hard way that even German firms like BMW and Audi have made efforts to rise to our standards of technical proficiency."

Mercedes experienced one of its worst years ever in 1992. The auto maker's worldwide car sales fell by 5 percent from the previous year, to a low of 527,500. Before the decline, in 1988, the company could sell close to 600,000 cars per year. In Germany alone, there were 30,000 fewer new Mercedes registrations last year than in 1991. As a result, production has plunged by almost 50,000 cars to 529, 400 last year, a level well beneath the company's potential capacity of 650,000. Mercedes's competitors have been catching up in the U.S., the world's largest car market. In 1986, Mercedes sold 100,000 vehicles in America; by 1991, the number had declined to 39,000. Over the last two years, the struggling company has lost a slice of its U.S. market share to BMW, Toyota and Nissan. And BMW outsold Mercedes in America last year for the first time in its history. Meanwhile, just as Mercedes began making some headway in Japan, a notoriously difficult market, the Japanese economy fell on hard times and the company saw its sales decline by 13 percent in that country.

Revenues(收益) will hardly improve this year, and the time has come for getting down to business. At Mercedes, that means cutting payrolls, streamlining production and opening up to consumer needs. Revolutionary steps for a company that once considered itself beyond improvement.

The author's intention in citing various nationalities' interests in Mercedes is to illustrate Mercedes' ______.

A．sale strategies

B．market monopoly

C．superior quality

D．past record