It will be some time before the full impact of the earthquake becomes clear. However, there is a need to provide some form of top-level assessment of the impact that the global automotive industry will see as a result of the earthquake and tsunami, insignificant as this impact is when compared to the suffering of those involved.
I have developed a simple model that attempts to quantify the possible impact on ECU demand across the vehicle domains. It has three input assumptions:
- the production decline relative to expected levels of Japanese OEMs in Japan
- the production decline relative to expected levels of Japanese OEMs elsewhere
- the production decline relative to expected levels of all other OEMs
From this it can be seen that the impact on ECU demand is ahead of the total production decline, as Japanese OEMs in Japan are expected to be hardest hit, and these vehicles typically have high ECU content.
It is far to early to get robust input figures for the model, but to give you an idea of the range of possible impacts, I've prepared the following table.
From this it can be seen from the left most data column that a modest oveall 1.7% global fall in vehicle production, centred on the Japanese OEMs, would lead to a 1.9% decline in ECU demand, and a 4.1% drop in HEV/EV ECU demand.
The full tool, with information by each vehicle domain, can be downloaded by Strategy Analytics AES clients here:
https://www.strategyanalytics.com/default.aspx?mod=reportabstractviewer&a0=6194