Continental Corporation says retaining its global engineering base has been of significant importance to its customers during the downturn.
Addressing the Automotive News Europe Congress in Cologne, Conti member of the board Ralf Cramer noted the tyre manufacturer had kept its engineering employees despite worldwide economic challenges.
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“We never did cut engineering – you can’t do this, you don’t do this, we didn’t want to do this,” he said. “We kept definitely around all our 6,000 engineers globally.
“This engineering powerbase is of great benefit for our customers. It is important Continental and other suppliers are technical leaders in their fields.”
Cramer also outlined ambitious expansion plans for Conti in Asia, with significant increases planned in market share. “We are moving fast in this industry in the east,” he said. “Our goal is 33% of our sales by 2015 in Asia – we are already higher than 25%.”
Separately, Cramer noted Continental did not have “a big incident”in its Japanese plant – “that was really some luck” – and was moving gradually away from single sourcing.
“Theoretically, single sourcing is not ideal, but practically in the future we will have single source because of technology and price. But the goal is to reduce single source.
“I believe we have uncertain times. But we have uncertain positive times. The market recovered in one year.”
