Could the global automotive industry really need an extra billion square-feet?
24/03/2015
However, industry expert David Peters has said he believes the true figure will be lower.
Mr Peters, founder of specialist consultancy DLP Advisors and a leatherbiz columnist, gave a keynote presentation in Bordeaux on March 24 at an event called The Future of Automotive Leather, organised by technology provider Lectra and World Leather.
He said he agreed with projections from research group IHS that light vehicle production will increase by 18% globally between now and 2020, increasing by more than 15 million vehicles to a total of around 98 million. He also agreed that growth in the premium segment would be even greater, running at possibly 32%. This would mean growth from around 8.3 million premium cars per year at the moment to 10.2 million.
Because premium vehicles use considerably more leather in their interiors than mainstream vehicles, Mr Peters has calculated that this increase could mean the automotive industry in 2020 will require as much as 47% more leather than tanners produce from the 45 million hides consumed globally by automotive at the moment, taking the total from around two billion square-feet per year at the moment to three billion square-feet.
“I think that’s aggressive,” he told tanners, car brands and tier-one automotive suppliers at the conference. “It would mean automotive would consume around 65 million hides a year, which would be too much. But I think it will go up by around 9 million hides a year and that, by 2020, the global automotive industry will consume 54 million hides per year, which is still a lot.”
He explained that larger hides from heavier cattle going to slaughter will account for a proportion of the extra volume, but that the overall volume of leather available in the world in 2020 is unlikely to be much greater than it is at the moment with around 215 million hides per year providing raw material. This means automotive will have to take a larger share of the available hides than it does at the moment.
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