Boston, MA - December 5, 2006 -New research, "Automotive Vendor Profiles," from the Strategy Analytics Automotive Electronics Service (AES), profiles the leading global automotive electronics vendors, and charts their relative successes and failures. Canada's Magna International reigns as the fastest growing automotive supplier, with an average annual rate of over twenty percent growth in the last five years.

Key themes from this analysis include much stronger five-year growth rates from some North American-based vendors. However this success story excludes companies, such as Delphi and Visteon, which continue to struggle. In addition, much of the growth is coming from suppliers' non-automotive operations, with one of the leading performers, JCI, expecting its overall sales to grow during the next financial year, despite its automotive interiors business shrinking some 3 to 5 per cent,

"Analysis of the 5-year average growth rates of the main companies in this report shows that North American-based companies are surpassing last year's Japanese companies in this sector," comments Ian Riches, the Director of Strategy Analytics' Automotive Electronics Service. "Six of the top 15 fastest growing companies are North American-based, five European and four Japanese. North American-based companies take five of the top seven places," he adds.

• In general, five year average growth rates have risen. This year's fifteenth ranked company, Brose, at 10.7% would have ranked as low as tenth in last year's analysis. The top twenty companies this year all scored higher five year average growth rates than the fifteenth-ranked company last year.
• Only eight companies showed negative five year average growth rates compared to fifteen companies in last year's analysis.

*Based on total company sales
Source: Strategy Analytics