FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Daimler said on Tuesday that sales of its Mercedes-Benz luxury brand rose 11 percent to 131,334 vehicles in March, extending the increase in year-to-date deliveries to 313,902.

"The great customer response on the new models makes me very confident that we will achieve our goal to post a new sales record in 2012," sales chief Joachim Schmidt said in a statement.

(Reporting By Andreas Cremer)