(Yicai Global) Dec. 21 -- Germany's automotive giant Bayerische Motoren Werke AG [ETR:BMW] (BMW) is going through a new round of senior appointments. Jochen Goller, currently the senior vice president of BMW Brilliance Automotive Ltd., overseeing sales and marketing, will take over the position of president and CEO of BMW Group Region China from Olaf Kastner with effect from March 1, 2018, the firm said.

Goller, 51, younger than all of his predecessors, joined BMW in 1999. He has gained extensive experience in operations in China when he served as the head of marketing in BMW China between 2004 and 2009. From 2009 to 2015, he successively led the MINI business in the UK and then in the global market. In 2015, he returned to the Chinese market to oversee sales and marketing as senior vice president of the BMW Brilliance Automotive, a joint venture between BMW and Brilliance Auto.

Olaf Kastner, 62, succeeded Karsten Engel, the then president and CEO of BMW Group Region China, two years ago. BMW was struggling in 2015 owing to the setbacks in localization and poor relations with dealers, and suffered negative growth in a single month for the first time in 10 years.

Kastner is an experienced professional in localization development as he had been the head of BMW Brilliance for six years. Under the leadership of Kastner, BMW focused on localization and introduced several updated models. It also built the Tiexi plant in Shenyang, capital of northeastern China's Liaoning province, to produce BMW engines, and the first battery factory in China for luxury cars.

With all these moves, BMW has revived its fortunes in the Chinese market, reaching a sales volume of 516,300 units in 2016, marking a year-on-year growth of 11.3 percent. By the end of November, BMW sold 542,000 vehicles in China, up by 14.7 percent compared with the same period in 2016, outnumbering the total annual sales volume of last year.

Harald Kruger, chairman of BMW Group, praised Kastner for his contributions during the 8-year tenure, and is confident in Goller's future performance in leading BMW's business in China, the company's largest market in the world. BMW has enjoyed a seven-fold sales increase in China from 2009 to 2017, and Kruger estimates the total customers of BMW will rise to 4 million in 2018.