Good morning/afternoon everyone,
As Executive Vice President CFO/CBO of Automotive Aftermarket, I would like to join in offering you a warm welcome to our Service Training Center here in Plochingen. Today, we want to talk to you about a number of subjects and innovations that are currently at the top of the aftermarket agenda.
Ladies and gentlemen, if we look back on the nearly 140-year history of the automobile, we can see one theme that has dominated it more than any other: the ongoing shift and continuous evolution toward greater convenience and safety.
When Carl Benz filed the patent for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine” in 1886, nobody could have imagined what a success story lay ahead of this three-wheeler. Today’s car is far more than a spartan means of transport. It’s a powerful computer, an entertainment chest, a life saver, and a multifunctional everyday helper.
And alongside the automobile, the workshop market has experienced a dynamic development. Today’s mechanics frequently grab their PC instead of a spanner, solving tricky repair and servicing problems virtually by consulting remote technical support.
And I myself have been able to follow this fascinating development first-hand for nearly 30 years now, both in my professional and personal life. What fascinates me most of all is the extremely rapid pace of change and the huge variety of developments our industry has seen, especially in recent years.
Right now, all of us are witness to decisive developments that will once again bring fundamental change to cars, and also to workshops.
A few years from now – and of that I have no doubt – we will be able to say that
- We saw with our own eyes how the history of the automobile was rewritten with the introduction of sustainable powertrain technologies
- We saw with our own eyes how mobility was reinvented and vehicles learned how to drive themselves
- And we saw with our own eyes how modern tools brought about a fundamental change in workshop processes, making them faster and simpler.
All it will take to successfully come through this change is the strength of will, courage, and far-sightedness to accept these changes and actively shape them. This applies to our entire industry, to workshops – and of course to Bosch as a company.
The automotive market is in a fundamental process of change that will also affect workshops’ everyday operations. My message to independent workshops, therefore, is this: see this change as an opportunity, not as a threat. As an opportunity to simplify and accelerate processes. And as an opportunity to open up new areas of business and gain more customers. Or, to use a yachting analogy: we can’t do anything about the wind, but we can change our tack.
Ladies and gentlemen, Bosch is on course to turn this change to its advantage and to shape it so that it offers its customers fantastic future opportunities. In the aftermarket context, we can especially benefit from our OE expertise, since this allows us to see early on what the aftermarket can expect to experience in the years ahead.
This head-start allowed Bosch Automotive Aftermarket to secure its business success over the past years of crisis, and to continue its supplies to customers uninterrupted even during the Covid-19 pandemic and the disruption to global supply chains. As a result, we again expect to improve our result in the current business year.
Let’s focus now on our program for today. We’re looking forward to taking a detailed look at two developments that are already playing an important role in today’s workshops, and that will become even more important in the future: these are electromobility and the opportunities that arise for workshops as a result of the increasing digitalization of processes.
Most workshop owners now realize that electromobility is no longer a future scenario, but something that has long become a common sight on the lifting platforms of the independent aftermarket. This doesn’t just apply to hybrid vehicles, but meanwhile also to fully electric vehicles. In this context, the question that is increasingly being asked is this: what are the requirements a workshop has to fulfill to be able to provide an all-round service for the drivers of these vehicles as well?
We will be answering this question, as well as many others, in today’s press briefing. We will show you how Bosch is using training courses to make workshops fit for electromobility, how our new repair set can be used for the resource-conserving repair of high-voltage batteries, and how we are giving our Bosch Car Service operations the practical means to prepare for market changes.
In addition, we will show you how digitalization opens up opportunities for workshops to accelerate and simplify their processes. With Bosch as a partner, the new digital world will not be more complex, but simpler, faster, and more convenient. So I would say that all of you can look forward to an exciting day with our experts.
