Light vehicles: global production up 7%

In 2022, year-on-year growth in global light vehicle production stood at around 6.9%, reported Autoliv, Inc., referencing data from S&P Global.

Overall, light vehicle production in 2022 was constrained by global semiconductor shortages and other industry supply chain disruptions.

For Autoliv, supply chain disruptions led to poor visibility into customer demand and material changes in customer orders on short notice, which negatively impacted this company’s production efficiency and profitability in 2022.

Now, Autoliv expects the current industry-wide supply chain disruptions to be a limiting factor for global light vehicle production in the first half of 2023, while it also expects demand and supply to be in better balance in the second half of 2023.

The most important driver of Autoliv’s sales is from light vehicle production.

Over the past 10 years, light vehicle production has shown year-on-year growths, with the exception of 2018-2020.

Despite strong end-consumer demand for new vehicles, global light vehicle production only grew 6.9% in 2022, well below the 8.9% expected by S&P Global earlier that year.

Production

For Europe, the light vehicle production growth of 18% that was expected at the beginning of 2022 turned into a decline of 1%.

Above all, this was due to difficulties in global automotive supply chains and limited availability of semiconductors, affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

During 2022, Autoliv experienced a limited improvement in of global light vehicle production in the second half of the year, compared to a relatively weaker first half of the year, indicating somewhat better semiconductor availability and the stability of global automotive supply chains in the second half of the year.

Chinese light vehicle production, the world’s largest automotive market, increased by 2.0 million units or 8% from 2021 to 2022.

In Europe, a major market for automotive safety systems, light vehicle production decreased 1% or by approximately 0.2 million light vehicles during the same period.

In North America, light vehicle production increased by 1.1 million units, or by 10% compared to 2021.