Cars, a black year for the automotive industry, sales down 55%, one third cuts jobs

2024 proves to be a black year for Italian automotive manufacturers, and forecasts for 2025 are anything but positive. For 55% of companies, as recounted by the data collected by the Observatory headed by Anfia (Association of companies in the automotive supply chain) and the Turin Chamber of Commerce, the current year will bring with it a drop in turnover. The most critical element is confirmed to be the domestic market, a factor mostly linked to the drop in Stellantis production volumes in Italy, with two out of three companies forecasting a contraction in revenues and a jump between positive and negative expectations at -40%. Against a difficult industrial backdrop in Europe and, in particular, in Germany, the leading export country for Made in Italy components, expectations on orders from foreign markets are also down for 50% of companies, with a negative balance of 30%.

For the more than 2,000 Italian component manufacturing companies, with 170,000 employees and almost 60 billion in revenues (source: Anfia), a revenue recovery trend that began after the Covid phase will therefore come to a halt in 2024, a phase that nonetheless ended 2023 with revenues growing by 3.1%. This strong difficulty that the sector is going through is reflected in employment levels, with companies expecting a drop in the number of employees in one out of three cases, and in the propensity to invest, which registers a negative balance of 19%. These are all indicators that get worse when analysing the performance of companies in the sector in Piedmont, where over 30% of companies are concentrated.

Anfia's forecast is that production volumes in the sector, between cars and motor vehicles, will fall by 30 per cent, with an alignment, at 50 per cent, between cars and commercial vehicles, the latter being unprecedented in the industrial history of the country historically characterised by higher volumes for passenger cars than for other types of vehicles.

Weighing on the sector are two key factors, the contraction in production volumes that weighs on Italy but also represents a trend in Europe, and the transition to electrics, which appears to be stalling, but which represents a heavy unknown for the 30% of companies working in the production of components for traditional engines.ù

In just three years, the average share of revenues for Italian companies derived from Stellantis and Iveco has fallen from 41.4 to 35 per cent, a negative trend that has emerged since 2022 and is now declining further. All this despite the fact that the links between the Italian supply chain and the Stellantis Group remain strong: almost 70% of companies in fact have Stellantis and Iveco directly or indirectly in their customer portfolio, a share that rises by ten points if one looks at the Piedmontese supply chain. At the same time, the percentage of companies that derive more than 50% of their revenues from the Stellantis-Iveco universe drops, from 39 to 31% in Italy, from 50 to 40% in Piedmont.