Subaru’s quandary is a lesson about the downsides of ultraefficient operations. Subaru notched 11 straight years of record U.S. sales results through 2019, with parent company operating profit margin soaring into the double digits, jumping as high as 17.5 percent in 2017.
Then the pandemic knocked Subaru off course, as it did other automakers, and the chip shortage compounded the crisis.
Subaru’s U.S. sales are expected to slide in 2021 for a second straight year after falling 13 percent in 2020 from an all-time high of 700,117 deliveries. It would be the first time Subaru has suffered back-to-back sales slumps since 1995, almost three decades ago.
Through November, Subaru’s U.S. sales were 532,664, a decline of 2.9 percent from a year earlier. Nakamura predicted the full-year tally will come in below 600,000, compared with 611,942 last year.
Subaru’s tepid sales come even as rivals zoom ahead — with Toyota Motor Corp., Mazda Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Hyundai and Kia all reporting double-digit percentage gains for the first 11 months of the year.
Nakamura predicted Subaru’s U.S. sales will bounce back to around 650,000 vehicles in 2022.
But first, he said, the automaker must secure enough microchips to churn out the cars.
Nakamura said the semiconductor shortage is easing. But as chip foundries raise their output, automakers are flooding them with orders in a mad scramble to capture pent-up demand and make up lost ground.
“We’re not exactly sure at this point how much supply that we can get,” Nakamura said.
“Next year, every auto manufacturer is going to be recovering, and they’re going to try to build their inventories back to normal,” he said. “We don’t think the foundries and semiconductor suppliers are going to be able to answer to every one of those orders.”
That is one reason Subaru is expecting a gradual ramp-up in 2022, Nakamura said.
