Sales Worry Carmakers More Than Supply Chains

As the coronavirus has morphed into a global epidemic, carmakers have been forced to scramble for parts and raw materials. But they say have been able to cope, sometimes by paying extra to ship components by air that would normally travel by land or sea.

“It’s a big challenge,” Oliver Blume, the chief executive of Porsche, said in a telephone interview. “We have a team that is monitoring the situation every day.”

“We have suppliers in Italy,” Mr. Blume said, speaking before the Italian lockdown. “We have to watch very closely in the next few days what will happen.”

On Monday, Porsche said the virus outbreak in Italy had not yet had any negative effect on production. Volkswagen, which owns Porsche as well as Audi and other brands, said it had also been continued operating without problems. Italian suppliers were still able to send shipments to Germany, a Volkswagen spokesman said.

Italian companies said they, too, were still in business. The tire maker Pirelli said that its Italian factories were still operating and noted that, in any case, they account for less than 8 percent of the company’s tire production. “There are no impacts on production activities,” Pirelli said in a statement.

Brembo, an Italian maker of high-performance brakes, said its three factories in northern Italy were still operating.

Fiat Chrysler’s Italian factories were operating normally on Monday, a spokesman said, although office workers were given the option of working from home. Fiat has reopened a factory in Serbia that closed temporarily last month because of missing parts from China.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/business/europe-carmakers-sales-coronavirus.html