OEM & Lieferant Ausgabe 1/2022

77 Editorial Dear readers, War in Europe, right on our doorstep – this was far beyond our imagination until we woke up to a new, cruel reality on the morning of 24 February 2022. Russia‘s attack on Ukraine marks a turning point in European post-war history and forces us to rethink and redefine our previous security, industrial and energy policy positions. The final consequences of this war for the automotive and supplier industry are already becoming apparent in certain tendencies and will continue to manifest themselves in the near future. What is certain, however, is that we will have to redefine the cornerstones of energy and raw material supply that are important for our trade and industry, that the Russian market and related markets will be restructured and that supply chains and industrial production structures will have to be rethought from the ground up. The most serious consequences in terms of energy policy will be in view of the great dependence of Germany and parts of Europe on Russian gas, coal and oil supplies. Substituting them and creating long-term solutions that avoid dependency in the future is a challenge that we will have to master with our European partners, but also at the national level, with a focus on renewable energies, especially from a security perspective. In the short and medium term, we will have to reckon with considerable price pressure on fuels – comparable to the situation during the oil crisis of the 1970s – which could probably lead to a corresponding reluctance to buy combustion vehicles. The market for battery-electric vehicles could benefit from this, as they are still the most accessible to the supply of electricity generated from renewable energy sources. In the short term, the loss of supplies of important rawmaterials such as palladium, neon or nickel will have an impact. However, Russia is not the exclusive supplier of any of these raw materials, so that replacement solutions are also conceivable here in the medium term. The Russian and Ukrainian markets will collapse completely in the short term, and their recovery depends largely on the political framework conditions. German OEMs exported about 40,000 vehicles to both Ukraine and Russia in 2021. That is 1.7 per cent of all passenger cars exported from Germany. The market share of German manufacturers in Russia in 2021 was just under 20 per cent, with 170,000 passenger cars produced there. Even if markets are said to have a short memory, the recovery of the Russian market is likely to be a long way off in view of massive economic sanctions imposed by the West, especially in the area of payment transactions and financing options. A profound and certainly lasting impact will be seen in the design of supply chains and global production networks. Whereas in the past the principle was to set up production and supply networks globally primarily according to the aspects of market proximity and costs, from now on the aspect of security of supply will clearly come to the fore in times of crisis. The Corona crisis has clearly shown us the vulnerability of these global networks, even if the causes were ostensibly seen in the temporary and thus relatively quickly recoverable instability of logistical supply chains. The Ukraine war shows us drastically how permanently unstable these networks can be. The production planners of the OEMs will increasingly say goodbye to exclusive development and supply partnerships with individual supplier companies. Such single-sourcing solutions will be replaced by at least double- or even multi-sourcing solutions that have to take into account a wide variety of security scenarios. These changes will not remain without effect on the cost side. However, they represent a new opportunity for the German supplier industry, which has already proven to be extremely crisis-resistant in the past with its enormous ability to adapt and innovate. The articles in this issue of OEM&Lieferant reflect precisely this ability of our industry and its service providers – even though they were largely written before the outbreak of the current crisis. But they also make us confident that with our human and technical capacities we are well equipped for a positive reorientation of our industry under changed political conditions. We would like to thank all authors, interview partners and advertising customers for their excellent cooperation. Your editorial team Dr. Rudolf Müller and Elisabeth Klock OEM&Supplier by VEK Publisher www.oemundlieferant.de Dr. Rudolf Müller Elisabeth Klock

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