Hilfinger Comments on Auto Suppliers’ Reopening Challenges

Partner Steve Hilfinger was quoted in a Plastics News article, “Some auto suppliers ‘won’t make it’ through reopening challenges, analyst says,” about challenges facing auto suppliers by the reopening of the automotive industry.

During the shutdown, Hilfinger said, suppliers still received payments from work or parts that were shipped beforehand. “We haven’t hit the liquidity pinch that we’re going to start to see as suppliers ramp up,” he said. “As they have to order more raw materials, this will be the period that those receivables are not coming in related to the period they were shut down.”

Hilfinger also said that trending programs like autonomous vehicles and mobility that had been driving a lot of automotive investment activity might be pushed back due to a lack of surplus capital. “I think right now people are just trying to figure out how to get to the other side of this crisis, and they’re conserving cash and capital to a great extent,” he said. “There’s so much more uncertainty than when we just had simple problems like tariffs to worry about.”

(Subscription required.)