“Russia was our second largest sales market,” Liqui Moly Managing Director Gunter Hiermaier said in a press release. “We voluntarily stopped our business activities there immediately. To make matters worse, China remained in a permanent lockdown, so this large market also lay fallow. We had to get turnover elsewhere.”

The Ulm-based company said its strategy is to continue increasing exports by adding more sales representatives, expanding overseas marketing measures and forming more subsidiaries abroad. It currently now has eight foreign subsidiaries.

“In Germany, we achieved growth of 15% in 2022,” Hiermaier said. “This means that our home country is still our largest market.” Sales in the United States grew by 30%, Liqui Moly said, which makes it the company’s second-largest sales market. The company said it experienced massive growth in almost all its export countries, including the Middle East, Asia, Central and South America and Europe, where its sales in France showed the greatest increase.

Liqui Moly said exports now account for two-thirds of its sales.

At the start of this year, the company promoted its administrative director, Uli Weller to the position of managing director, alongside Hiermaier.

Hiermaier said 2035 is a key date for the company because the European Union has resolved to prohibit sales of new vehicles powered solely by internal combustion engines that year.

“We are prepared and intend to achieve an annual turnover of €2 billion by this time,” Hiermaier and Weller together said in the press release. “We are bringing more and more products for electric vehicles and alternatives drives to the market and also advancing into markets and segments where motor oil will still be crucial for mobility and the economy well beyond 2035. There is infinite potential, and we are exploiting it.”