AUTOMOTIVE STUDY 2025 / Šaroch (ed.) et al.

Introduction e automotive industry is a traditional and important sector in the world economy. Asia has become the industry’s centre of gravity and largest market over the last twenty years, although both Europe and America remain important markets with signi cant production capacity. ose who are closely involved in international economic relations know that this is a highly concentrated industry, which brings economies of scale, and an industry with a high level of international investment. International trade in cars is also a signi cant part of world international trade in terms of its scale. It is a sector where hundreds of technical inventions and innovative production processes with potential applications in other areas of human activity have been developed or are being applied. is sector is undergoing a signi cant transformation, for which the name CASE was born in the recent past. is acronym stands for the simultaneous emergence and de-velopment of digital technologies, combined with advances in connectivity (C), the emergence of driver assistance systems evolving into autonomous driving (A), the so-called new economy represented by car sharing (S) and the transition to electromobility (E). e above transformation is made possible not only by the development of digital technologies, which have resulted in cars becoming, in part, ‚computers and data collec tors on wheels‘, but also by regulation, which, through various economic and adminis trative economic policy instruments, is leading to the replacement of internal combus tion engine propulsion with electric motors or other alternative propulsion methods, such as hydrogen-based technologies. is study attempts to o er an overview of the state and development of the global automotive industry in the aforementioned perspectives by taking a relatively broad view through quantitative data. Chapter 1 provides a view of the global automotive industry as a whole and includes an analysis of the growing importance and inclination towards electromobility, where China is undeniably the dominant player. e position of the European automotive industry in a global comparison is also of interest to the study, hence we devote a separate chapter (2) to it. Here too, this year’s study pays increased attention to the rising phenomenon of electromobility, but also to the importance of the sector for the European economy and its structure in supply chains. Chapter 3 is devoted to the importance of the automotive industry for the Czech econ-omy and the small Czech market. Chapter 4 provides an analysis of the development of the nancial performance of companies, using the perspective of economic value added in comparison with the economies of the Visegrad Four countries and Germany. e study is closely related to our work published in 2023 under the title European Au-tomotive Industry in the Century of Asia and is a selection from more extensive mate-rial published directly by Škoda Auto University in Czech in 2024.

Wishing you an inspiring read. On behalf of the team of authors

Stanislav Šaroch

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