Europe Autonews
Nick Gibbs
Global steering supplier Nexteer believes that its expansion into Northern Africa will help it double revenue in Europe by 2020, allowing it to better compete against rivals Robert Bosch and ZF Friedrichshafen in the region.
The company, formerly a division of Delphi Automotive, will start electric power steering rack production in Morocco in 2019. The new factory, Nexteer’s first in Africa, boosts its production footprint in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) to three. Its other sites are Gliwice and Tychy, Poland.
Nexteer will use the Morocco plant to expand its customer base in Europe, where it expects to double revenue by 2020, using 2015 figures as a baseline, EMEA boss Herve Boyer told Automotive News Europe.
In 2015, Nexteer’s European revenue was around $340 million. That figure rose to around $400 million in 2016 and is expected to reach $550 million by this year, Boyer said.
BMW is currently the Chinese-owned company’s biggest customer in Europe. Nexteer makes electric power steering racks for Mini and smaller BMWs in Poland. It also supplies PSA Group and Fiat from its Polish sites, the company said.
Nexteer has also built up its r&d capability in Tychy, where it plans to employ 150 engineers, up from 50 now. “The horsepower of our engineering used to be in Saginaw, Michigan, but to support the growth we have to do more and more locally,” said Boyer, 47, who was choosen as a Rising Star in the European automotive industry by ANE last year.
Currently the company builds electric power steering units mainly for smaller cars in Europe but wants to expand its offering to larger vehicles.
“It’s clear that to fuel growth in Europe we have to be able to offer manufacturing of any kind of EPS [electric power steering],” Boyer said.
Nexteer is targeting vans, one of the few vehicle classes remaining that still use hydraulic steering. Nexteer calculates that switching to electric power steering improves fuel economy by 6 percent.
The company’s new plant in Kenitra, Morcocco, will have the capacity to build 700,000 electric power steering racks annually, Boyer said. It will become the company’s 25th plant globally once it is opened.
Nexteer began life as Saginaw Steering Gear and operated as General Motors’ in-house supplier. It was spun off as a division of Delphi Automotive in 1999 but was brought back in-house when Delphi declared bankruptcy in 2005.
Nexteer was born in 2010 when GM sold the supplier to Pacific Century Motors, the investment arm for the city of Beijing. Nexteer was 59th in the Automotive News Europe ranking of top 100 suppliers based on 2016 sales.
Nexteer is developing steer-by-wire racks for use in autonomous cars, starting with Level 4, which will still require the car to be fitted with a steering wheel. The company showed a prototype rack that de-links the steering wheel in certain autonomous maneuvers, for example during collision avoidance, to prevent the driver from counter steering in panic.
Boyer estimated steer-by-wire could account for 30 percent to 50 percent of Nexteer’s electric power steering business by 2030.
You can reach Nick Gibbs at ngibbs@crain.com.
