BANKRUPTCY

Now that Takata has filed for bankruptcy, automakers around the world are likely be stuck with billions of dollars in recall losses. Feeling the most pain will be Japanese customers such as Honda, Toyota, and Nissan.

EARNING DIP

Auto sales continue to be slow in June, as the industry had its sixth consecutive month of negative results. While some automakers such as Volkswagen and Subaru posted high monthly gains of 10.7% and 11.7%, other automakers such as GM, Ford and FCA posted sales drops of 4.7%, 5.1%, and 7% respectively.

HUMAN CAPITAL

As auto sales have continued to fall through this year, so has production and employment. Average employment has fallen by more than 2% this year from 211,000 to 206,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

INDUSTRY DIRECTIONS

Volvo has announced that all of their vehicles from 2019 on will be hybrids or powered solely by batteries. They are the first major automaker to make such an announcement.

In response to Volvo's announcement, The Atlantic compiled a nice summary of all "Future Car Promises" from each of the automakers.

After being the most valuable US automaker for the past three months, Tesla has fallen to second place behind GM with a market cap of $50.7b compared to GM's $52.6b.

LABOR DISPUTE

FIEV, France's automotive supplier association, has backed President Macron's tough labor reform proposals. The proposals are very unpopular with the unions.

MERGERS, VENTURES, ACQUISITIONS

Faurecia and Dongfeng Motor have signed a new agreement that aims to provide advanced clean mobility solutions to Dongfeng affiliated OEM brand passenger and commercial vehicles. The new venture, located in Xianyang, will begin operations in 2018.

AK Steel Holding Corporation will buy Precision Partners Holding Company. The acquisition will bring Precision's tooling and stamping technologies into AK Steel.

Continental will take a minority stake in France's EasyMile to work on autonomous braking and safety systems and sensors.

Singapore's Ayala Corp (AC Industrials) has acquired Germany's MT Misslbeck Technologies. MT creates injection molds, models, tools, and plastic parts at its plants in Ingolstadt.

VW is expanding a partnership with Kuka to develop "innovative solutions for parking and charging" electric cars based around robots. 

PLANT OPENING

Knapheide Truck will open a 75,000sf facility in North Charleston, South Carolina. The facility will provide interior and body components for the Mercedes-Benz vans.

REGULATION

CLEPA, Europe's automotive supplier association, is pushing for no tariffs and free movement of goods into the UK following Brexit.

To meet its targets set by the Paris climate accord, France will ban sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2040. New ecology minister Nicolas Hulot said the decision was a question of public health and "a way to fight against air pollution".

RISK ANALYTICS

Often overlooked and hard to detect, synthetic ID fraud is directly affecting dealers and auto lenders. Fraudsters use multiple real pieces of identifying information from multiple sources to create a new synthetic identity. Because a loss from a synthetic identity may be categorized in the same way as typical losses, "no one knows how big of a problem it is".

SUPPLY CHAIN

The automotive industry is the catalyst for Industry 4.0. Machine vision is being used to push optimization, speed and quality.

Michael Schuldenfrei has an interesting writeup covering the quest for zero defective parts per million. It takes more than process to hold semiconductor companies to the high standards of automotive quality, when lives are on the line.