Global Automotive Sector (# 1 & 2): The international environment reshuffles the cards.

Résumé:

Over the past two decades, the international environment has undergone gradual upheavals (e.g., climate change, industrial relocations...) and external shocks (e.g., pandemics, armed conflicts, trade wars...) of a magnitude, nature, intensity – and sometimes abruptness – rarely seen before.

These transformations affect numerous business sectors in an interdependent manner, particularly through their supply chains. The automotive sector, highly globalized, particularly illustrates these growing uncertainties: it is influenced by evolving external pressures, including political and regulatory (with an increasingly significant geopolitical dimension), technological (from now on, more and more characterized by disruptive innovations as reduction of CO2 emissions), economic, and social (especially destabilizing in major production and distribution areas). These pressures have profoundly transformed, particularly over the past decade, the strategic challenges faced by actors in the sector.

By applying the first two levels of the PREST model (Lemaire, 1997, 2000, 2013), a framework for analysis and strategic decision support, and validating its results through a Delphi approach with a multinational panel of experts, the first phase of this study aims to clarify the evolution of environmental pressures as well as their consecutive challenges currently affecting the global automotive sector.

In a second phase of the research, this first part of the research will make it possible to identify differentiated strategic options and implementation methods (strategic levers) available to automotive sector's main categories of global players (“archetypes”), whether innovation frontrunners or followers, whether growing fast or not, whatever the market -mature or fast growing- in which they operate..