Under the guidance of Jens Haas, Managing Director at Alix Partners, the panellists Dr. Carl Friedrich Eckhardt, Head of CoC Urban Mobility at BMW; Nicolas D. Gutbrod, Director of Helbing Business Advisors; Nikolaus Waser, Vice President and Head of Watson IoT Global HQ & Center Munich of IBM Watson; as well as Fabian Wasmus, Managing Director at Vitruvian Partners discussed the future and evolution of the Mobility Market and its effects on the private equity sector.
The panellists started out by asserting the dramatic pace of developments in the mobility market. Next to the tremendous velocity of technological advancements, consumer needs change and diversify more quickly than ever.
The panellists agreed that next to important hardware components, such as hybrid and electric motorization, the focus of the automotive industries will be on the provision of additional comfort services to meet consumer needs, such as car sharing.
This has led to the appearance of many new companies specializing in anticipating consumer needs for comfort and other services. It is expected that the old players of the automotive market will gradually have more and more difficulties keeping pace with the quick evolution of consumer needs.
As a result, the number of M&A transactions and deals were predicted to go down, while more and more short-lived partnerships were expected to conclude between the industries giants and new smaller companies. This is believed to be the more efficient method in order to ensure quicker and better answers to the consumer’s constantly changing desires.
These factors all contribute to a great increase in investor interests in the automotive market, but it is very difficult to predict the industry’s future winners. It very well may be that the landscape of the automotive industry will change drastically in the near future.
Chaired by
Jens Haas,Alix Partners