(AOF) – Aramis Group announced on Wednesday evening the appointment of Fabrice Farcot as interim CFO, replacing Stéphane Rougeot.
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Automotive / OEMs: A slow recovery
After a bad year 2020, some actors
expect a very gradual return to the level of activity preceding the crisis: not before 2024-2025.
The global pandemic weighed heavily on the accounts of Valeo, Faurecia and Plastic Omnium.
2020, a bad year for French equipment manufacturers.
They all ended 2020 posting losses, despite recovering in the second half of the year. Faurecia recorded 379million euros in losses last year. Its sales plummeted by 35.4% in the first half of the year, following the shutdown of automobile production in China, then in Europe and the United States. Its turnover fell by nearly 20% to 14.6 billion euros over the year as a whole and its operating margin fell from 7.2% to 2.8%.
Its competitor, Plastic Omnium, posted sales down 16.7% in 2020, to 7.7 billion euros. Personnel and general expenses were reduced by 240million euros and investments by 27%. Including 250million asset write-downs, its net loss reached 251million in 2020.
Valeo, for its part, suffered a fall in its turnover of 16%, to 16.4 billion euros, and a net loss slightly above one billion euros.
Hydrogen, a new eldorado for equipment manufacturers
The manufacture of green hydrogen is an alternative to electric batteries. Bosch, one of the world’s leading automotive suppliers, will invest one billion euros by 2024 in fuel cells, which transform hydrogen into electricity. The German group predicts that the green hydrogen market will represent in Europe nearly 40 billion euros by 2030, with annual growth rates of 65%. He estimates that the market for mobile fuel cell components for vehicles will be worth around 18 billion euros by the end of the decade.
French automotive suppliers are also seeking to capture part of this market. Michelin and Faurecia are banking on their subsidiary Symbio, which produces fuel cells. Plastic Omnium wants to become a world leader in hydrogen by 2030 and achieve 3 billion euros in sales by that date.