The year 2024 came to an end with a less-than-balanced record for Stellantis. Despite a solid overall performance, the automotive group still saw a significant drop in global deliveries in the fourth quarter, with a focus on the North American market. The reduction in production, put in place to deal with excess inventory at dealers, caused the results to weigh heavily. So let us try to analyze the major issue based on the information that has been collected in recent weeks and months.
Main problem, reduction in production
As we have discussed elsewhere, Stellantis’ global vehicle deliveries fell by 9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024, with a particularly large drop in the North American market. In fact, overseas, shipments plummeted by 28 percent, a rather large number for the company. This drop was largely caused by one of the company’s strategies, namely that of reducing production, which had been put in place to deal with high inventory levels at dealers.
Despite this contraction, the automotive group born in 2021 from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and PSA Groupe still delivered a remarkable amount of cars, we are talking about 1.4 million vehicles in total, including those destined for dealers, distributors and fleets. Stellantis highlighted the fact that there has been a significant decrease in deliveries in North America, which has reached a rather worrying 28 percent. This event stands in contrast to a much smaller decline in sales in the same region, which was around 5 percent.
Percentages of concern in the U.S.
In particular, sales in the United States declined by 15 percent. To try its best to counter this situation, the automaker decided to try to implement a temporary suspension of production at various plants during the fourth quarter. At the same time, it also planned to adopt an incentive policy for unsold vehicles on dealer lots. This move was necessary to better cope with the vehicle overstock event, a problem that had begun to cause numerous complaints and problems for a large proportion of Stellantis dealers.
Thus, the automotive group stated a few days ago that this strategy has been successful, succeeding in significantly reducing inventory in the United States. In particular, the big goal achieved by the company was to achieve a decrease of 80 thousand units during the last quarter. At the end of this period, the automaker closed with a stock of just over 300 thousand vehicles, which allowed it to improve inventory management and to relieve in a pronounced way the problems related to overproduction that was plaguing so many companies. So now we just have to stand by and see, therefore, how things will go in that area of the world for the automotive group in the coming months.