2nd ICAI 2022

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2022

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

and Hungarian automotive industry and estimate, where (in which activities) local suppliers play an important role and from which countries the various inputs used by the industry come. Second, we supplement the results of the above analysis with information gained from company and expert interviews. In these interviews, we try to assess and identify the various factors, which influence the choice of inputs (local or foreign, and if foreign, from which country sources), and we list the most important factors influencing the extent of reliance on local suppliers by multinational firms. Among others, we conducted interviews with successful local suppliers and based on these sources of information as well as information from buyer firms, we determine the characteristics of successful local suppliers. In both countries, ten companies can be found in the interviewed sample. We supplemented the information gained from the company interviews with information from publicly available sources (newspaper articles, websites of the firms and balance sheets of the companies). These two different methodological approaches supplement each other well and help us to overcome the well-known data problems and the problem originating from the lack of qualitative data on automotive lead firms and suppliers. 3.1 Results of the data analysis In the structure of production (Figure 1), the main difference between the two countries is the strong local embeddedness of the Czech automotive industry – around 40% of the total output is the contribution of various Czech industries in terms of intermediate consumption –, while in Hungary the domestic background links fell from 30 to 10% and imports represent 60–70%. However, even in Czechia import gradually increased while a small but rising domestic portion emerged in Hungary. It was one of our most important tasks to investigate the source and meaning of the ‘domestic’ rise, which has been revealed by background research and interviews. 3. Problem Solution

Figure 1: The production structures of the automotive industries

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