The price of car repairs will rise in the coming months due to the rise in the price of parts, mostly imported and with components, such as copper, whose costs have risen enormously in recent months, the industry association predicts.
“It’s not noticeable in the market yet, as it’s a relatively recent process, but it’s very likely to have a very big impact, as the price of the parts [automóveis] has risen sharply and parts are an important part of maintenance costs,” the secretary general of the National Association of Automobile Commerce and Repair Companies (ANECRA) said in an interview with the Lusa agency.
According to Roberto Gaspar, “even in this second semester, consumers will start to feel this increase”, which, however, is “difficult to predict [de] How much [será]because it depends on the evolution of the cost of many of the components”.
The association leader notes that the rise in costs “is not yet reflected in the values of the car repair staff – which he says the “very low price” is in fact “a structural problem of the market in Portugal” – – but emphasizes that it is already clear in the pieces, “a lot of it imported and with components whose price has risen sharply, such as copper”.
Yet the current deregulation of the auto market – caused by the shortage of semiconductors since the pandemic recovery and, more recently, the shortage of raw materials due to the war in Ukraine and the collapse of certain supply chains – is especially notorious for the scarcity of new vehicles leaving the factories.
This shortage of supply relative to demand has led to price increases, with the value of new cars “rising” recently, in a context where some car dealers have “huge order backlogs of more than a year”.
“The most direct consequence of the lack of cars is that prices have skyrocketed. Historically, manufacturers have always produced far more than the market needs, forcing them to run promotions, campaigns and huge discounts,” said Roberto Gaspar.
As he explains, “the current increase is mainly due to the overall reduction in these discounts, namely in the purchases of fleet managers, who received huge discounts for the quantities purchased and now manufacturers purely and simply do not make any type of discount”.
Another of the current “disruptions” of the car market, according to ANECRA’s secretary general, is the “supply gap”: “Because it is difficult to produce cars, manufacturers produce cars with higher margins, which are the mid/high and high That is why we see an increase in the sales of the ‘premium’ brands and also in [veículos] electric vehicles, although in the latter case it is also due to manufacturers’ obligation to meet certain emissions quotas,” he said.
As a result of this ‘delay’, there is currently “a very large supply of hybrid and electric vehicles and a very small supply of the mid/low and low segment”, confirming a “major shortage of these cars on the market, which , way, distorts the results” of the sale, he stressed.
For example, data from the Associação Automóvel de Portugal (ACAP) shows that in the first eight months of the year, up to August, the car market recorded an accumulated decline of 2.8%, compared to the same period in 2019, the last year before that. pandemic, the sales volume is down by 36.3%.
According to Roberto Gaspar, “there are no signs of normalization in the short term”.
“Car manufacturers forecasts were that things will normalize in the second half of this year and fully stabilize in the first quarter of next year. But with the introduction of the war factor and some breaks in the chain of some materials raw materials that are crucial for cars , today we are talking about an equation that is more difficult to predict,” he admitted.
According to him, “at the moment there is a lack of steel and other elements used in cars, namely in electric cars, and this makes it difficult and uncertain when the situation will stabilize”.
“I have heard several international players say that the situation can hardly be normalized for the last half of next year,” he said, specifying that, in Portugal, “forecasts point to 2022 being more or less at the level of 2021.” , which means that sales are about 30% lower than in 2019.
Source: DN
