Good morning! It’s Friday, July 26, 2024, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know.
1st Gear: Stellantis Scrambles After Dismal First Half
Stellantis is in deep doo-doo right now, and the automaker is scrambling to address problems it is facing in North America and elsewhere by cutting output and prices. This news came after Stellantis reported worse-than-expected first-half results for 2024.
Net income has fallen 48 percent in the first six months of 2024 to $6.1 billion. That is… not good. From Automotive News:
Its operating margin on adjusted EBIT shrunk to just below 10 percent, slipping below the double-digit margin it aims to achieve for the full year.
“The company’s performance in the first half of 2024 fell short of our expectations,” CEO Carlos Tavares said in a statement on July 25.
Margins declined most significantly in North America, Stellantis’s key region for profits, after shipments declined 18 percent amid an unfavorable model lineup and pressure on prices, the company said.
Chief Financial Officer Natalie Knight said Stellantis is taking “decisive actions to address operational challenges.”
Measures include inventory reduction, especially in North America.
“(That) is the market that needs the most work and where we are most concentrated when we look at the second half,” Knight said. “There are operational issues we have had in North America where I think we could have performed stronger.”
Knight said Stellantis would reduce production in North America this quarter, as well as prices. “That’s one of the things that is important for us, to calibrate how the supply and demand meet,” she said.
To help cope with this downturn, Stellantis is apparently planning to drastically cut labor costs and is expecting a 25 percent reduction in logistics expenses for the second part of this year.
Maserati may also not be too long for this world in the Stellantis portfolio.
Knight suggested the company may reconsider what would be “the best home” for Maserati, even though for now the group remains focused on driving improvements at the Italian luxury brand, whose shipments plummeted by more than half to 6,500 units in the first six months.
Stellantis is under increasing pressure as it deals with high inventory levels and a string of executive departures in the U.S.
The company has already extensively cut costs, with €500 million more in savings planned for the second half.
Some analysts have started flagging the limits of Tavares’ strategy on costs. He has also faced pushback from shareholders and advisory firms over his $39 million pay package for last year, a 60 percent increase from 2022 levels.
Analysts at Citi said in a note they expect Stellantis’s problems to continue. “We see no real improvement until and unless Stellantis removes the overhang from inventories – which itself would put pressure on full-year …margins,” they wrote.
Stellantis is hoping new model launches will help the automaker in the second half. Right now, there are a total of 20 new vehicles planned across Stellantis’ vast stable of brands.
Listen, I don’t know if these changes will actually help Stellantis recoup some of these massive losses in the second half of 2024, but damn. It’s gotta do something, because a net income drop that huge isn’t something that you can fix easily.
2nd Gear: Hybrids Help Hyundai Thrive
Hyundai reported a record profit for the second quarter of 2024. It actually topped analysts’ projections, backed by really strong hybrid sales that made up for lagging electric vehicles. From Bloomberg:
Operating profit for the three months ended June was 4.3 trillion won ($3 billion), compared with the 4.2 trillion won median estimate compiled by Bloomberg. The profit was a record, at least since 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue rose 6.6% from a year ago to 45 trillion won, the Seoul-based company said.
[…]
Hyundai also said it plans to go forward with a listing of its India unit by the end of 2024. The initial public offering could raise as much as $3.5 billion, people familiar with the matter have said, and will start gauging investor interest this month, with a listing likely in September or October, they said.
“India is the world’s fourth-biggest stock market, it is doing very well,” Lee Seung Jo, Hyundai’s chief financial officer, said in a call with analysts. “We are preparing for new growth in the country.”
Hyundai’s shift to hybrids and SUVs, such as a new Santa Fe released last year, helped the company offset the losses in EVs, Hanwha Investment & Securities wrote in a note before the earnings announcement. Hyundai plans to release the new hybrid Tucson in Europe and the Casper Electric in South Korea in the second half, the note said.
Hyundai sold about 122,000 hybrid vehicles in the second quarter, accounting for 11.6% of total deliveries. Battery-powered vehicles accounted for 5.6% of total shipments, compared with 7.4% a year earlier.
“Hybrids are making almost similar profit margins with gas-powered vehicles, which is in double-digit,” Lee said. EVs are generating at least low-single-digit margins, due to higher incentives given to dealers, he added.
Adding to Hyundai’s good news, its market share for hybrids in the U.S. rose to 15 percent, up four points from a year ago, and it’s not slowing down. The Korean automaker expects the Santa Fe hybrid to drive up growth in the second half of 2024.
Total retail sales in the second quarter were 1.03 million, dropping 3% from a year earlier, according to its earnings presentation. Value-added products, such as sports-utility vehicles and luxury brand Genesis, accounted 61% of the total. Retail sales in North America climbed 5.2%, while those in Europe fell 1%. China saw a steep decline of 32%, while India posted a 1% gain.
Hyundai plans to hold its annual investor day in August with analysts to discuss its long-term business plan. It will address details on shareholder returns as well as the operation of its new plant in the US state of Georgia, Lee said.
If this news from Hyundai shows me one thing, it’s that if you build good cars, people will tend to buy them. Also, hybrids are here to stay, baby.
3rd Gear: UAW, Lear Reach Tentative Agreement
Three days after the strike began, the United Auto Workers union says it has reached a tentative agreement for its 500 workers at a Lear factory in Missouri. This strike ending means General Motors can resume production of its midsize pickup trucks and cargo vans. From the Detroit Free Press:
GM was forced to idle its nearby Wentzville Assembly plant in Missouri on Monday because the workers at the Lear Wentzville facility, which supplies the seats for GM’s midsize pickups and vans, went on strike at midnight Sunday. That was when their contract expired and they had not reached a new tentative agreement with the company.
The Lear facility produces the seats as part of a just-in-time production system at GM’s Wentzville plant. That means Lear makes the exact number of seats GM needs at the exact time GM needs it, with very little kept in inventory. So without the seats being produced, GM had to stop the assembly line and send some 4,600 workers home until Thursday.
GM spokesman Kevin Kelly confirmed that Wentzville restarted operations Thursday morning.
“Our supplier has reached a tentative agreement, and our focus is to resume regular production as quickly as possible for the good of our customers,” Kelly said in a statement.
Lear spokesman Brian Corbett told the Free Press, “We are pleased to have reached a tentative agreement with the UAW at our Wentzville facility. We are focused on resuming normal operations.”
Here are some more details about the strike and what the tentative agreement entails for Lear workers:
UAW Local 282, which represents the Lear Wentzville workforce, reached the tentative agreement late Wednesday and finalized it in the early morning hours, during which time Lear strikers returned to work, UAW Local 282 President Bill Hugeback told the Free Press on Thursday.
Hugeback said the first shift was operating at the Lear facility Thursday but, “it’s probably going to take a little while to catch back up on production.”
As part of the agreement, Hugeback said the workforce will receive a raise in wages, but he declined to offer any more details until the union could print it up and hand it out to the workers later.
“We’ll let them read for it for a couple days and meet on it and then vote,” Hugeback said. “They’re happy that they’re going back to work and the strike is over. As far as the contract is concerned, they don’t know all that’s agreed to yet, we have to print out the pamphlets and hand them out.”
We just love it when workers get their fair share, don’t we folks?
4th Gear: Toyota To Build Lexus A Battery Factory
Toyota is reportedly planning to build an electric vehicle battery plant in Japan exclusively for Lexus. The plant is set to be located in the southwestern prefecture of Fukuoka, where Toyota plans to build up a supply chain for battery electric vehicles.
A spokesperson for the automaker said they were aware of the report, but it was not something Toyota had officially announced. That being said, it’s in line with Toyota’s current EV plans to strengthen battery production capacity. From Reuters:
The automaker has previously said it will introduce EVs employing next-generation batteries globally from 2026, manufactured by its EV-focused unit BEV Factory.
The company is targeting sales of 3.5 million EVs annually by 2030, with just under half of those made by the BEV Factory unit. It sold 104,000 EVs in 2023.
The amount Toyota would spend on the battery plant and the start date for its construction have yet to be finalised, according to Nikkei, which did not say where it got the information.
The Nikkei Business Daily reports that the plant will be operated by Primearth EV Energy, another Toyota subsidiary that focuses on building batteries for hybrids, plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles.