More will die says D - B • Daimler-Benz AG believes that
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the European truck market over 16 tonnes has peaked, and that today's over-stretched commercial vehicle factories will be "under-utilised again within a few years".
The West German truck, van and bus builder is now pessimistically predicting that a huge shake-out is coming in the European truck industry with yet more blood-letting.
Main-board commercial vehicle director Helmut Werner says only four of Europe's leading commercial vehicle manufacturers will survive to the end of this century. Speaking in London last week, Werner said that Daimler-Benz is about to split its corporate and administrative structure into three semi-autonomous trading divisions with a central holding company to ensure that it is competitive enough to survive.
"It's a logical decision," Werner said, "to make sure we have necessary information exchanges between the different companies and to develop different companies in the optimum way."
Daimler-Benz is still the world's biggest heavy truck manufacturer and it has set its UK operation, Mercedes-Benz, a 20% market share target by 1993. The company now has a 15% share of the British commercial vehicle market in third place behind market leader lye co Ford and close behind runner-up Leyland Daf.
Despite the fact that the UK remains the most competitive truck market in Europe, Mercedes-Benz is confident that expanding its business by one per cent a year is not over-ambitious.
Werner predicted that Mercedes-Benz will build 263,000 vehicles this year — a 12% improvement over 1987. He also believes that DaimlerBenz will use more and more components from outside suppliers and that the UK automotive industry stands to do well.
More joint ventures and col laborative development programmes will come, says the German giant, though the van it was researching with Mitsubishi is now "dead," a year after Daimler-Benz announced that it was carrying out a feasibility study to produce Mitsubishi L300 vans in Spain. Possible other light commercial projects with Mitsubishi are still going ahead, however.
Mercedes maintains that in Britain it is "not losing money" and that a strong domestic economy bodes well for the future. It predicts that 18,000 Mercedes commercial vehicles will be registered in the UK this year (an 18.4% increase over 1987) and the company expects to register at least 20,000 next year.