TURIN -- Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said the automaker was able to reduce its break-even point to less than 50 percent of its installed production capacity in the final months of last year. It did so to protect Stellantis from "chaos" created by the combination of the chip shortage, rising raw materials prices and geopolitical risks.
The auto industry standard break-even point is generally 70 to 80 percent of installed capacity, as measured by the Harbour index, which is based on a plant working two eight-hour shifts for 235 days a year.
Stellantis declined to give a volume figure for the company's current break-even point or reveal what that number was when the group was created by the merger of PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in January 2021.
Last year, Stellantis shipped 6.14 million units to its distributors and dealers, up 3 percent from 5.95 million in 2020 on a pro-forma basis combining the two group's results.
Its adjusted operating margin jumped by 95 percent to 18 billion euros ($20.4 billion), equivalent to an 11.8 operating margin compared with a 6.9 percent margin in 2020, also on a pro-forma basis.
Tavares told reporters Wednesday that the idea to reduce Stellantis' break-even point come to mind during his summer break, adding he was proud the company reached this goal by the end of 2021.
"On Sept. 1, I brought the top leadership team to a specific meeting and we decided that we would look to bring the company below 50 percent [of capacity] break-even point," Tavares said.
His said his view was that there are so many uncertainties around the auto industry that Stellantis needs to think continuously about on how to protect itself from this "chaos."
Tavares has long considered the break-even point to be a key measure of an automaker's financial health, a point he reiterated on Wednesday in announcing record earnings at Stellantis.
One of his accomplishments after becoming CEO of PSA in 2014 was to cut the then-struggling group's break-even point to 1.6 million vehicles in 2017 from 2.6 million in 2013. And after acquiring Opel from GM in 2017, he set the break-even point to 800,000 vehicles from an undisclosed number (at the time, Opel was losing hundreds of millions a year while selling about 1 million vehicles annually).