Automotive Sector Report - Edition 1

The aim of this report is to extract sector relevant analysis from a number of sources and has combined a number of IMI research reports including current landscape report, labour market report and job postings analysis. These have been combined with other data sources and headline news to present a picture of the current landscape of the automotive sector. The majority of the data used related to the time period September and October 2021.

Key take away points

• Education and retail automotive sectors have large proportions of businesses showing downturns in turnover over the past month. In fact, these proportions are the second and fourth largest of all sectors.
• Although automotive businesses cash reserves are low in comparison to other businesses, confidence of business survival is high.
• The proportion of the workforce in automotive sector on furlough and predominantly working from home are at the lowest levels since start of pandemic.
• There does appear to be an uptick in redundancies in the sector, although numbers are significantly lower than at the peak of pandemic. The redundancy rate is the 3rd highest of all the sectors. Conversely, vacancy rate is one of the lowest, specifically, the motor trades sub sector is particularly low.
• Job posting for the 6 automotive occupations have seen significant increases in the past month all increasing by more than 10%. All apart from paint technicians see job postings now not only higher than 2020 but also higher than 2019 levels.
• 5% of all businesses in the UK are electrifying their vehicle fleet and 4% are installing charging points.
• Latest SMMT data forecasts that 287,000 plug-in vehicles will be registered in 2021 and there will be  more plug-in vehicles to be registered in 2021 than the whole of the last decade.
• 90,000 TechSafe^TM technicians are needed by 2030.
• Plug-in car performance holds steady despite overall registrations falling (-24.6%). Plug-in vehicles now account for 16.6% of all cars registered so far in 2021.