Ferrari builds one car fewer than the market wants, and the wait is part of the car

Ferrari attributes one rule to its founder, Enzo Ferrari: the company will always deliver one car less than the market demands. Its executives still quote it. In 2019 its head of marketing, Enrico Galliera, repeated the line and explained that sometimes it means making customers wait, with the 812 Superfast then carrying a waiting list of two to three years. In 2013 Luca di Montezemolo, then chairman, announced that Ferrari would deliberately build fewer than 7,000 cars that year to protect exclusivity.

Volumes have grown since the company listed on the stock market in 2015, from 7,255 cars shipped in 2014 to 13,752 in 2024, and the rule has survived the growth. When the Purosangue, Ferrari’s first four-door model, launched in 2022, the company said it would stay within about 20% of annual output, and in 2023 it paused orders because the waiting time had reached about two years. The most limited models are offered to clients selected on their history with the brand, and according to figures reported in 2025 most new Ferraris go to people who already own one.

The wait is part of the car

In most industries a waiting list is a capacity problem. At Ferrari it is part of the offer. A buyer who waits two years for a car has been told, in a way no advertisement can say, that the object is wanted by more people than will ever get it. The concept the method uses for this is Scarcity as the Product: a class of goods where part of the value sits in the difficulty of getting them.

Ferrari belongs to the class only in part, which is what makes it instructive. The diagnostic question is if the object were freely available tomorrow, would anyone still pay the premium? For a Ferrari the answer is mixed. The engineering, the design and the racing history would keep much of the price. The premium on limited series, and the resale values that often exceed list price on them, would fall. Ferrari has kept the difficulty because it knows how much of the promise rests on it.

The premise is a turnstile

A strong premise is one the customer accepts as a condition of entry. A sign saying “for collectors” can be ignored, while an allocation that depends on years of ownership works by itself. The method calls this the self-executing turnstile. It filters out the buyer Ferrari least wants for its rarest cars, the speculator who orders to resell at once, and reports suggest the company expects limited-series buyers to commit to keeping the car.

The turnstile also protects existing owners. Strong resale values are a proof the brand keeps for the people already inside: the car they bought holds its worth, partly because Ferrari controls who buys the next one.

A moat made of time

The moat test asks what a competitor with ten times your capital would still fail to copy. Building a fast, beautiful car is within reach of several rich companies. Buying more than seventy years of Formula One, the prancing horse and Maranello is not, because time cannot be bought. On that legend Ferrari has built several layers of revenue (the cars, the limited series, sponsorship, licensing, merchandise, a theme park in Abu Dhabi), and each layer uses the legend without consuming it because car volumes stay below demand.

Doubling output in ten years shows that scarcity is relative: it is measured against demand, and demand grew too. The discipline lies in growing behind it, adding models instead of flooding existing ones, and capping a lucrative line such as the Purosangue before it changes what the brand means. The open question is how the first fully electric Ferraris, and any pressure for faster growth, will test that balance.

If scarcity is part of what your customers pay for, it has to be designed and governed like any other part of the offer. Building that into a value proposition is part of what we do.