Ten years of modularity: empirical evidences on the restructuring of the auto part industry (In French)

Vincent Frigant

Cahiers du GRES (2002-2009) from Groupement de Recherches Economiques et Sociales

Abstract: This article reviews the carmaker-driven industrial restructurings that positioned First Tier Suppliers (henceforth FTS) at the heart of the world’s automobile system. It also draws necessarily temporary conclusions about their performance. The article is organised into three main sections. The first recaps the major transformations induced by modularity that affected inter-firm vertical relationships and highlights the challenges facing FTS. The second uses a ranking of the 30 leading automobile suppliers to analyse the instability of their global hierarchy. The final section focuses on three questions that became key for suppliers: profitability; R&D spending; and internationalisation. Most analysis involves a statistical study of a sample of 20 companies. The three sections converge to reveal a diversity of automobile supplier trajectories, in terms of both their intrinsic performance and the new kinds of operational modes they have operated within their vertical relationships.

Keywords: Modular production; auto part industry; First tier suppliers; industrial restructuring; profitability; internationalisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L10 L23 L24 L62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://cahiersdugres.u-bordeaux.fr/2007/2007-20.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to cahiersdugres.u-bordeaux.fr:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Working Paper: Ten years of modularity: empirical evidences on the restructuring of the auto part industry (In French) (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:grs:wpegrs:2007-20

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers du GRES (2002-2009) from Groupement de Recherches Economiques et Sociales Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vincent Frigant ().