Teresa Valladares has become something of a fortune teller for Mazda . As the person in charge of finance in Mexico, the director and her team are responsible for making daily forecasts so that the company can make the right decisions. A job that he has been doing since his arrival at the assembly plant in August 2020, at a time when certainties ceased to exist in the automotive industry and daily operations were based on forecasts that changed daily. Sometimes even twice in one day.
2020 was described by several of the managers of the automotive sector as the “most challenging year that the industry has had in the last 100 years”. And is not for less. The coronavirus pandemic disrupted its entire supply chain, from the production of auto parts to the marketing of models.
“It has been a very interesting year and a half, with many challenges… There have been times when we made a forecast in the morning and by the afternoon everything had changed,” he says.
Since then, vehicle manufacturers have been unable to restore balance to their supply chains. Plant stoppages and dealership closures in 2020 were followed by a shortage of containers that forced assemblers to resort to air transport to bring spare parts. At the same time, a global shortage of semiconductors limited the availability of vehicles, while inflation forced manufacturers to raise prices.
Valladares considers all these factors within his forecasts, which are constantly changing as new phenomena arise around the world. The latest of these has been Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has once again set off manufacturers’ alerts over a potential shortage of neon gas for microchips, palladium for catalytic converters and nickel ore for lithium-ion batteries.
To keep finances afloat at a time when cars are dwindling, the company has focused on after-sales service. Mazda launched several after-sales service alternatives – such as Mazda Service at Home, Express and To Go – that sought to motivate the owners of a model of the brand to return to the dealer for services.
“We sell cars, but we cannot drop the entire operation on the sales floor. There is a very large vehicle fleet that requires services. And these services have a cost,” he says.
Thanks to these initiatives, the brand managed to reduce the percentage of customers who return to the dealership for service to 80%. In addition, this income allowed the brand’s dealers – and the Mazda subsidiary – to keep operating costs afloat at the height of the chip shortage.
“We ended the fiscal year in March, and although the volume targets were not met, we have had good strategies to meet our profitability targets,” he says.
The brand’s finance director predicts that the recovery in sales volume will come in 2023.
