The World’s biggest truck maker, Daimler has issued a waring to the industry saying that the supply chain is “somehow broken”, even though such things as the silicon chip shortage has eased.
Daimler issued the missive to the industry despite revealing a stronger outlook for the full year, even with the spectre of inflation and the continuing delays and disruption from the devastating war in the Ukraine.
“It’s all over the place, tyres, electric parts, engines and in some cases just nuts and bolts are all in short supply any various times,” said Daimler Truck’s chief financial officer Jochen Goetz.
“During the pandemic a lot of investments were postponed for good reasons on the supplier side, but now we’ve seen a sharp increase in demand and some of the mid-sized suppliers are simply not capable of ramping up fast enough, which means the supply chain is somehow broken” he added.
Goetz. announced that Daimler Truck had posted $AUD 20.5 billion (€13.5billion) in group sales for its third quarter, up 27 per cent on the same time last year. Adjusted earnings before interest and tax jumped 159 per cent to $AUD2 billion (€1.3bn), with the company pointing to larger sales volumes and success in passing on cost increases to customers.
Daimler revealed that it has sold nearly 41,000 more trucks and coaches so far this year than it did in the first nine months of 2021 and now expected full-year group revenues to be between $AUD77.7 billion (€50bn) and $AUD80 billion( €52bn), up from a previous estimate of around $AUD73.99billion ( €48bn).
Goetz said the shortage of chips was partially being addressed by “technical changes” that enabled the truckmaker to use different types of semiconductors, while some chipmakers had successfully ramped up production.
“But just to be clear, there are still some chips that are constrained and most likely will be constrained for the whole of 2023,” Goetz said.
Daimler sold 134,972 trucks and buses in the third quarter, up from the 106, 304 vehicles in the same period last year, but underlined that the supply chain constraints remained an issue.
“Bottlenecks in the supply chains continued to have a negative effect on truck production, meaning that demand could not always be fully met,” Goetz said.
The results followed the spin off and public float of Daimler Truck from its parent, Mercedes-Benz last year which came after Volkswagen decided to spin off its truck business, Traton in 2019, Traton also posted growing sales and profits last week as it warned that supply chain bottlenecks were also causing delays in it delivering vehicles.
