In 2021, MAHLE Aftermarket increased its sales by 18.5 percent to approximately EUR 1.1 billion (about $1.125 billion USD). The company says those are the highest annual sales figures achieved since the business unit was founded. The workshop equipment business exhibited particularly strong growth, and MAHLE Aftermarket expanded this to include a range of solutions that will allow, for example, independent workshops to perform diagnostics and maintenance for e-vehicle batteries. Support for the positive development of sales also came from a continuously high demand for replacement and accessory parts for commercial vehicles, electronic components, and filters for alternative drives.
To ensure its ability to deliver despite the current tensions in the global supply chain, the business unit realigned its logistics structures and set a resolute course for digitization. For example, in the future, there will be fully automated logistics hubs, thus ensuring rapid and error-free delivery.
“Despite very tense supply chains and declining fleet performance, we achieved strong growth in a difficult market environment. This clearly demonstrates the trust that our customers have in us,” said Olaf Henning, member of the MAHLE Management Committee and head of the Aftermarket business unit, at a press conference. “Particularly, in the area of battery diagnostics, we came in far ahead of the global competition.”
In 2021, the area of workshop equipment managed to grow much faster than the market, the company says. MAHLE Aftermarket is expanding this business unit with the BatteryPRO line of diagnostic tools. Since the end of March this year, MAHLE Aftermarket has been the world’s first supplier to enable independent workshops to perform battery diagnostics with the E-Scan function on the diagnostic tool MAHLE TechPRO. By the end of the year, this function will be expanded include the E-Health and E-Care units.
E-Health performs diagnostics on vehicle batteries via the charging plug and evaluates the measured data in the cloud. In this way, the state of a battery can be classified in relation to all other recorded batteries of the same model in the fleet. In addition, E-Health generates a forecast of the remaining expected life of a vehicle. Since the start of 2022, the new diagnostics solution for passenger cars has been tested in practice together with TÜV NORD Mobilität and a well-known European fleet operator. In the next step, MAHLE Aftermarket will also offer battery diagnostics for battery electric trucks and buses.
E-Care is a service unit for performing maintenance on the cooling circuits of vehicle batteries. In this context, vehicle and coolant manufacturers set certain replacement intervals for the coolants used. In this way, MAHLE Aftermarket enables workshops to secure additional business volume beyond the internal combustion engine.
The growth strategy for MAHLE Aftermarket also rests on the stable pillars of the replacement parts business for commercial vehicles, a growing portfolio of electronic components, and an increasingly broad range of filtration solutions for alternative powertrains. For example, the company is planning to continuously increase the share of the commercial vehicle parts business in the total business volume by 2030.
In addition, MAHLE is expanding its wide range of digital information and has set up a digital workshop where MAHLE products for conventional and alternative powertrains can be experienced first-hand. MAHLE is taking an important next step toward strengthening its logistics structures and supply chains by setting up fully automatic logistics hubs. In the end of 2022, the business unit will take the initial step of opening a fully automatic warehouse in Olive Branch/USA. And in 2023 further European locations will follow. MAHLE Aftermarket plans to gradually build up a network of fully automatic hubs to guarantee fast and reliable handling of goods. This is intended to benefit customers by ensuring faster deliveries, fewer returns, and minimal cost shares for goods logistics.
