Japanese OEMs are struggling to adapt to the COVID-19 problem. Plants are being temporarily shut down and production adjustments are being made.
While domestic plants are generally operating quietly, overseas bases are being affected in various ways, depending on the country. Here is a summary of announcements by the major companies.
Doosan Infracore announced on March 24 that “the share of product marketing and customer support using live content broadcasting on SNS is growing in China.” The company has conducted more than 20 live machine maintenance training sessions through SNS, and the total number of users has reached about 7,300, with 140,000 followers on WeChat.
More than 1,200 machines were sold through such online marketing, and the sales of parts sold on WeChat reached 10 billion won.
Due to the spread of COVID-19, Japanese automobile OEMs have stopped production in Indonesia. Isuzu stopped operating its plants April 1, and Honda and Suzuki stopped April 13.
Even before the COVID-19 crisis, the Indian automotive sector was facing a severe downturn, but the problems were amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns across India and the rest of the world. The situation was compounded because India was transitioning from BS-IV to the BS-VI era.
These are challenging times for the Indian automotive sector because of slow economic growth, negative consumer sentiment, axle load norms, a liquidity crunch, low capacity utilization and potential bankruptcies. The current lockdown has severely affected the entire ecosystem of engine driven applications in India.
For the first time, automobile OEMs reported zero domestic sales and very limited exports in April. According to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), the industry is losing more than $300 million per day.
This article appeared in the March 2020 issue of PowerTALK™ News
The railway network is rapidly expanding in Bangkok, Thailand, the core city of Southeast Asia. The aim is to disperse urban functions that have become severely congested due to urban development and the rapid increase in the number of cars.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has begun manufacturing the basic structure of wind turbines at the Nagasaki Shipyard, where excess capacity exists. This is because MHI’s specialty LNG carriers are monopolized by Korean manufacturers and MHI is not receiving orders. Now, they take on non-shipbuilding jobs and help maintain the employment of the shipyard. Their Nagasaki Shipyard started manufacturing the basic structure that supports large wind turbines. Since the shipyard has a space for handling large parts of the ship, it can also be used to manufacture wind turbines.
This report first appeared in the September 2019 issue of PowerTALK.
The bad times in the India automobile market started with the slowdown in Q4 2018, triggered by the NBFC (Non-Banking Financial Companies) crisis. Since then it has been 10 consecutive months of hard times for almost all automobile segments. All the segments in the country, be it passenger cars or commercial vehicles, have registered a decline.
Readers of PowerTALK aren’t looking for autonomous vehicles to hit the roads soon, if our survey published last month is any indication.
In the April issue of PowerTALK, we asked readers, “When do you think a fully autonomous vehicle will be available in the market place?” Only 22.22% of respondents said it would happen within five years. More, 33.33%, said it would happen in the period of six to 10 years.
Other Top Stories in this issue of PowerTALK include
This article appeared in the March 2020 issue of PowerTALK™ News
Based on the capacity of EV-equipped batteries sold in January 2020, the three largest Korean battery companies (LG Chem, Samsung SDI and SK Innovation) have a combined share of 30.8%, exceeding 30% for the first time. In the ranking of total power consumption of EV batteries, China’s CATL is in the top place for the third consecutive year, LG Chem is in third place, Samsung SDI is in fifth place, and SK Innovation is in tenth place. For the first time, SK Innovation has joined the Top 10.
South Korean automotive battery giants are moving into the U.S. market, with SK Innovation teaming up with Ford and LG Chemical with GM to promote the construction of an automotive battery plant. SK plans to invest about 300 billion yen in the plant to produce 22 gigawatt-hours of automotive batteries, enough to power 220,000 EVs a year, and in a joint venture with Ford, the two companies will invest 600 billion yen to build a giant 60-gigawatt plant.
SK’s annual production capacity as of 2019 is only 5 gigabytes at its Korean plant. The capacity is expected to increase to 30 gigawatts in 2020 with the launch of plants in China and Hungary, to 85 gigawatts in 2023 with the addition of the US plant, and to exceed 185 gigawatts in 2025 with the addition of the joint venture with Ford. SK, a late entrant to the market, ranks sixth with a 5% share of the global market in 2020.
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