ZF electric motor
At the beginning of the year, the automotive supplier bundled its electrical activities in a new division.
(Photo: dpa)
Stuttgart The automotive supplier ZF is making faster progress in the transformation than expected in the industry. By the end of 2020, ZF had won orders for purely electric drive components with a sales volume of 14 billion euros for the coming years.
“This positive trend continued in the first few months of this year with further new orders,” says CEO Wolf-Henning Scheider. “We are well positioned to offer our customers the entire spectrum of e-mobility from a single source for all mobility applications.”
In this snapshot, ZF even outperforms the two larger competitors. Bosch had reported an order volume of 7.5 billion euros for electric drive components for 2020. At Continental’s Vitesco drive division, the volume is estimated at a mid-single-digit billion figure.
At the beginning of the year, ZF bundled its electrical activities in the new “Electrified Powertrain Technology” division. Around 30,000 people are employed there. Scheider emphasizes that this has successfully accelerated the transition to electromobility at ZF.
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The core of the product range are the inverters as a central component of the power electronics. “We want to become the market leader in Europe in this segment and be among the top providers worldwide,” emphasized Scheider.
ZF boss Wolf-Henning Scheider
“2020 was an ambivalent year. But we have mastered the crisis together, advanced the company’s transformation and secured substantial new orders in the strategically important fields of future technologies. ”
(Photo: dpa)
ZF recently surprised everyone by offering 800-volt systems. They are the top segment for electric cars and allow vehicles to be charged much faster. The system became known through the Porsche Taycan. But ZF is not the supplier here. However, according to information from the Handelsblatt, other sports car manufacturers, including those from Italy, have already ordered from ZF.
Sales and margins are expected to increase in 2021
In the Corona year 2020, the foundation group suffered a drop in sales of eleven percent to 32.6 billion euros and did very well in an industry comparison. The adjusted operating profit (EBIT) was one billion euros. The adjusted EBIT margin fell from 4.1 to 3.1 percent. The bottom line is a loss after taxes of 741 million euros.
“2020 was an ambivalent year. But we have mastered the crisis together, advanced the company’s transformation and secured substantial new orders in the strategically important fields of future technologies, ”said Scheider.
ZF Friedrichshafen had put the brakes on costs during the crisis and announced the cut of up to 15,000 jobs. The company reported that the number of jobs was reduced by 6450 last year. But because the takeover of the truck supplier Wabco added 12,000, ZF employed 153,500 people, almost 6,000 more than a year earlier, at the end of 2020
For the current year, Scheider is forecasting sales of between 37 and 39 billion euros. The EBIT margin should improve to 4.5 to 5.5 percent. The corona pandemic and the delivery bottlenecks for microchips continued to cause uncertainty, it said
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