Global and China Automotive Wiring Harness, Connector and Cable Industry Report, 2019

Automotive wiring harness companies worldwide can be divided into four echelons. The first-echelon players are just Yazaki and Sumitomo Electric Industries, each earning more than $10 billion a year, wherein Yazaki grows in an endogenous way and Sumitomo Electric Industries expands by collaborations and mergers and acquisitions.

MSSL, a joint venture of Sumitomo Wiring Systems (SWS), a subsidiary of Sumitomo Electric Industries, and India’s Samvardhana Motherson, has staged acquisitions in wiring harness field: in 2014, MSSL acquired the US-based Stoneridge for $67.5 million; in 2017, MSSL bought shares of PKC, a Finnish commercial vehicle wiring harness manufacturer for €570 million; MSSL means to acquire LEONI, a German company that is in a tight corner recently, and if the deal is done, Sumitomo Group will overtake Yazaki as the world’s biggest wiring harness producer in terms of revenue.

The second-echelon players are typically Aptiv, LEONI, and Lear. Lear, a company that mainly operates automotive seating systems, a kind of business contributing over 75% revenue, will be likely to make its Electrical Division an independent business or sell it to others.

The third-echelon players include Kyyngshin Industrial, Draexlmaier, Kromberg & Schubert, Furukawa Electric, YURA, and Fujikura. Kyyngshin Industrial is a joint venture of South Korea’s Kyungshin Co., Ltd., and Sumitomo Electric Industries. Players in the fourth echelon are a number of small wiring harness firms.

In 2018, the global automotive connector market was worth roughly $17.8 billion (value per vehicle was around $193 on average, in comparison with an average of $169 in 2017). That was because large manufacturers raised their prices latter than cooper price rose in 2017 and new energy vehicle sales surged. Connector value per new energy vehicle averages at $500 to $800. In particular, considering safety much at an early stage of designing their new energy vehicles where they lack experience, OEMs often try to use many expensive connectors. The more experienced an OEM is the less high voltage wiring harnesses and connectors it will use. What’s more, a vehicle tends to use more connectors, for adding a hardware capability needs almost several or even more than a dozen connectors. That’s the main stimulus to the expansion of the automotive connector market in the future.

Yet OEMs are trying to reduce the use of connectors as well. In 2019, the automotive connector market will expectedly increase by a tiny 0.6% over the previous year and reach $18.5 billion, as lower automobile sales led to a slump in revenue of the bellwether TE Connectivity. On one estimate, as a rise in global automobile sales comes with a swarm of new connector entrants in the BEV market, the automotive connector market may grow by 3.9% in 2020, predictably being valued at $23.6 billion in 2024.

Big wiring harness vendors like Yazaki, Sumitomo, Fujikura, Furukawa, YURA, Aptiv, and LEONI, are capable of making cables, especially Japanese companies all of which boast large capacities, state-of-the-art technologies and copper mines. Also, they can produce high voltage cables for new energy vehicles.