Yes, you read that headline right. Except the consultants making the argument -- Ronald Haddock and John Jullens of Booz & Co. --
published an article making that case without even using the question mark. The piece appears in the firm's Strategy+Business journal.
To understand their sunny outlook, you have to look past the industry's current travails and toward medium-term global demographic and economic trends, and the products and business models that would fit them best. It's a theme we've touched on before here, with some musings on the
personal transportation industry, better known these days as the hard-hit auto sector.
The Booz consultants attach a lot of importance to what they call the rapidly emerging economies -- the BRIC nations plus the likes of Malaysia, Argentina and Turkey. They see a strong correlation between economic growth and a desire for personal mobility. But they also think auto companies have a lot of adapting to do in order to profit from those consumer desires in the future:
Global vehicle makers will also need to
develop speedier innovation, with locally inspired solutions to local
problems. For instance, marketers in some nations may need to reach
consumers who cannot read. The auto brand names of today may adorn a
variety of products in the future -- engines, car bodies, or mass
transit vehicles. Popular car models may well be produced with several
power-train options available: electric in major Chinese cities
struggling to reduce air pollution, ethanol in sugarcane-rich Brazil,
diesel in oil-rich Russia.Not all of today's
automakers will survive this transition, but those that innovate
appropriately will enjoy the prospect of hundreds of millions of new
customers.
So who's ready to innovate appropriately? The authors cite moves by Daimler AG and Renault Nissan BV, among others. No mention of General Motors Corp. or Chrysler Group LLC. But hey, what about all those Buicks in China? And all those Fiats in Russia? -
Kenneth Klee
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