Autoliv will increase its 2023 sales guidance to about 17% organic growth from 15%.
STOCKHOLM — Autoliv, the world’s largest producer of car airbags and seat belts, raised its annual sales guidance after meeting third-quarter profit expectations, the supplier said in a statement on Friday.
CEO Mikael Bratt said the company would increase its 2023 sales guidance to about 17 percent organic growth from 15 percent, citing development of light vehicle production, to which it is highly exposed.
“LVP has developed better than expected, even with the UAW strikes in the U.S. We have continued to see an improvement of supply chain stability throughout the year,” Bratt told Reuters said.
In a separate conversation with Automotive News Europe he said the strikes had “a very little impact” on the company’s business in the quarter and expects the to be the case again in the fourth quarter.
“We have also seen some other OEMs are picking up the slack that comes from the strike,” Bratt told ANE.
Despite unusually high cost inflation that has squeezed Autoliv and other car industry suppliers in recent years, the Swedish company has managed to pass on a large amount of the costs to its customers.
It also launched a cost-cutting program earlier this year, including closing down some plants and cutting 6,000 jobs, which is also expected to help the company’s results.
“We are working hard to get cost out and drive productivity, which resulted our adjusted operating income increasing by 40 percent” to $243 million compared with $173 million during the third quarter of 2022, he told ANE.
The stabilization of raw material prices and the increased availability of semiconductors has meant that LVP has also slowly started to recover.
Bratt said another positive change has been the reduction in in so-called calloffs. He said that if an automaker orders 100 parts right now they take more than 90 percent of the order, which Europe tracking at about 85 percent. That is a vast improvement over the worst of the pandemic and chip shortage when they would take about 50 percent of an order, he told ANE.
The company said that it expects its adjusted operating margin to rise by around 1.5 to 2 percentage points in the fourth quarter from a year earlier.
Autoliv’s operating profit rose to $232 million in the third quarter, from $171 million a year earlier.
Autoliv ranks No. 33 on the Automotive News Europe list of the top 100 global suppliers, with worldwide sales to automakers of $8.8 billion in 2022.
Source: Europe Autonews
