The automotive industry expects certain macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties would put a break to car sales’ full-year 2024 growth. Nonetheless, electronic components manufacturers are likely to benefit indirectly from the growth rate of decelerating car sales.

In an interview with AEI, Jimmy Wu, Chief Executive Officer at Lelon Electronics Corporation said the weakened car market would prompt carmakers to innovate further in-car technologies in a bid to boost sales.

“Car sales (in 2024) is not good worldwide, so car manufacturers need to increase technology to boost sales. Therefore, it is a good year for us (electronic components manufacturers) because they (car makers) will order more components,” said Wu.

Among the technology trends in the automotive sphere, Wu said, will likely happen in the fields of advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS), on-board panel/cluster, and on-board charger (OBC).

Solid Growth Pace

The automotive field has been the bastion of growth for Lelon over the past years. In fact, it expects the segment’s revenue share to stay at the 30 percent level in 2024. This after the automotive field registered a strong 31 percent share during the first half of the year, and zoomed past 35 percent share in Q3 2024.

Overall, Lelon expects a good year 2024, revenue-wise. Wu said its revenue for October 2024 alone registered NT$906 million in revenue. For that reason, the company grew 17 percent (NT$8,624 million) from Jan. to Oct. 2024 over the same period in 2023.

“The revenue growth mainly comes from the automotive electronics market. Lelon has been steadily thriving in this field, designing in many AE application products such as ADAS, digital instrument cluster, and on-board charger,” said Wu, adding that they have started to feel the benefit of the design-ins it had with application engineers in 2022.

Nonetheless, despite its customers’ optimism for the automotive electronics and industrial equipment sectors, it is likely the market will continue to be cautious following the changing political landscape. Particularly, the recent election results in the United States, which may indicate a shift in policies.

Despite this, the automotive electronics market will remain the primary focus for Lelon and will implement its non-China, non-Taiwan (NCNT) delivery business strategy to cope with the market challenges.

New Thai Plant Plays Crucial Role

Aside from automotive, Lelon considers several segments to drive business growth to the industry and the company in the coming years. For one, Wu noted the emerging importance of AI-powered servers as a new market. “AI-powered servers will be a good market for us because of big data. It will be an emerging business segment because AI servers will definitely require a lot of electrical power,” said Wu.

Lelon is currently on track for the construction of its new plant in Thailand. Specifically, with an investment of 260 million Thailand Baht, the new plant is in Amata City in Thailand’s Chunburi. Accordingly, the said factory in Thailand is in response to “China + 1” market trend. The company aims for the new Thai plant to shorten delivery time in the region as many of its Japanese and other area automotive customers have factories in Thailand.

Moreover, Wu said the new Thai plant, which is likely to have trial production in the Q3 of 2025, will support its non-China, non-Taiwan delivery strategy. This is because the Thai factory carries a modular design. Hence, the development of production is flexible, and the company can adjust its capacity according to market demand.

Despite the cautious market prospects in 2025, Wu said the company will continue to create added value to its products and maximize production processes and investments in equipment to provide its customers with reliable products and services.

09 January 2024