The Regional Nature of the World’s Automotive Sector

Abstract

There are 29 automotive firms in the world’s largest 500 firms. Yet none of these are “global” firms, defined as having at least 20 per cent of their sales in each of the three regions of the broad “triad” of the E.U., North America and Asia. Indeed 23 of the 29 auto and auto parts firms are home-region based, with an average of 60.6 per cent of their sales as intra-regional. These are representative firms across the 500, as the average intra-regional sales for all manufacturing firms is 61.8 per cent. These are a few special cases, especially Toyota and Nissan of firms being active in two regions of the triad. DaimlerChrysler and Honda are “host-region oriented”. Seven cases are discussed in some detail to explore the reasons for the lack of globalization in the world automotive business.regional, intra-regional, automotive, globalization