| Description: | In recent years, the automotive industry has seen lots of mergers and acquisitions. This resulted in a highly concentrated industry with a few large companies. The main markets are the USA, Western Europe and Japan.
Besides the core business, designing and producing vehicles or parts of cars, many car companies also provide financial services such as car leasing and rental, finance and insurance. Because of the high competition, it is necessary for companies in the automotive industry to distiguish themselves. This is possible by introducing new types of cars, which are brought to the market at a high pace.
In addition, controlling the costs is an important issue among the car producing companies. To achieve a better cost efficiency, most car manufacturers switched to production with flexible platforms, enabling multiple models to be produced on the same platform.
Especially Asian manufacturers are gaining market share by offering clean and reliable cars at competitive prices. |
