Sleepless in Stuttgart: How Western Tier-1s Can Restart Their Growth Engine in 2025

One recent night a German supplier CEO sent a terse text to his CFO: “VW postponed Q3 volumes again. How do we fill the gap?” The same midnight anxiety echoes from Detroit to Turin as Western Tier-1s confront shrinking order books and eroding margins.

The hard landing - numbers that hurt

Continental closed 2024 with €39.7 billion in sales, a year-on-year slide of 4.1 percent despite aggressive cost controls. ZF Friedrichshafen’s top line fell from €46.6 billion to €41.4 billion after it spun off its axle-assembly business, leaving an 11 percent gap to bridge. Forvia managed to hold revenue around €27 billion, yet its leadership issued two profit warnings in the same twelve-month stretch. Put simply, Western OEM programmes no longer supply the scale that once made every new platform a tide that lifted all boats.

China: growth engine wrapped in barbed wire

Passenger-vehicle sales on the mainland reached 23.1 million units in 2024, up 5.3 percent, with electric and plug-in hybrids edging toward the 50-percent mark. Yet the policy backdrop is volatile. Brussels has confirmed counter-vailing duties that can reach 45 percent on Chinese-built battery-electric cars. Even so, EU statistics show a 1 591 percent surge in car imports from China between 2019 and 2024, it proofs that walls rarely go up fast enough to stem a market-share flood.

The forty-eight-hour RFQ test

Programme awards are now won or lost before the first engineering hour is booked. Chinese contenders regularly return complete quotations within two days, forcing Western rivals to compress processes that once sprawled across a fortnight. Here a Multi Agent RFQ Manager, built within a few days on Synera Low-Code platform, has shown that a swarm of domain-specialised agents can read a 600-page spec, benchmark geometry, simulate manufacturability, and draft a fully costed offer in minutes, not weeks. A South-African electronics manufacturer that replaced spreadsheets with Siemens’ Valor BOM Connector reported similar gains, citing “significant overall improvements” in both accuracy and turnaround. In an environment where late equals lost, automation is becoming table stakes.

Three pivots that separate survivors from strugglers

Cross-vertical expansion Tier-1s already excel at sensors, lightweight structures, thermal management, and battery integration. These are capabilities that translate neatly into drones, agri-robots, and specialised off-highway vehicles. Margins can be rich, but volumes are modest, so disciplined engineering-to-cost becomes the passport to profit.

AI-first RFQ engines With Synera’s low-code platform, engineers drag, drop, and chain together analysis nodes; AI agents then do the heavy lifting. Early adopters report bid-cycle reductions exceeding 70 percent and far fewer “cost-creep” surprises after award. Faster responses lift win rates; better up-front physics lowers the risk of under-quoting.

Reuse as a KPI McKinsey estimates that applying generative-AI analytics to remanufacturing and spare-parts scouting can lift profit margins by double digits while trimming warranty costs by up to ten percent. When AI highlights a 2022 battery-tray tool that fits a 2025 drone fuselage, the development budget stays onshore and scope-change headaches evaporate.

Turning strategy into 90-day momentum

Begin by mapping the RFQ funnel: where do hand-offs stall, how many engineer-hours evaporate before a price emerges, and what penalties accrue when quotes arrive late? Appoint a reuse product owner with P&L authority; their mandate is to treat legacy parts as assets, not leftovers. Pilot an AI-driven quoting workflow on three live tenders, using Agents to validate specs, interrogate CAD, and seed cost models directly into ERP. Finally, treat China less as a sales Mecca and more as a capability laboratory: study the rapid-iteration loops of your Shanghai-based competitors, then replicate the same cadence in lower-risk product lines at home.

Your turn

Which lever - diversification into new verticals, AI-first RFQ automation, or industrial-scale reuse - will matter most in your board meeting next week? What obstacle stops you from acting now? Share your insight below or send a direct message for a deeper, data-backed conversation. The sharpest comment will feature in my next post. Let’s build the open-source playbook that propels Western suppliers back to the front of the grid in 2025.

Sources referenced in the article

• Continental AG – Earnings, Financial and Net Assets Position, 2024 Annual Report (sales down 4.1 % to €39.7 bn). Continental Annual Report

• The BRAKE Report – ZF’s 2024: Financial Dip, Strategic Progress (sales €41.4 bn, –11 %). The BRAKE Report

• FORVIA – Full-year 2024 Guidance Update & Accelerated Measures to Improve 2025 Performance (revised sales outlook €26.8–27.2 bn). forvia.com

• Reuters – China car sales maintain growth pace in 2024; EV and hybrid sales hit record (23.1 m units, +5.3 %). Reuters

• Brussels Morning – EU targets Chinese EV imports with 45 % tariff hike (provisional duties from Oct 2024). brusselsmorning.com

• Eurostat – EU car trade surplus: €89.3 bn in 2024 (imports from China +1 591 % vs 2019). European Commission

• The Wall Street Journal – Chinese Competition Has Led to Job Losses in Euro-zone Manufacturing, ECB Says (≈240 000 jobs affected). Wall Street Journal

• Synera – Accelerating complex processes with multi-agent AI (RFQ Manager architecture). synera.io

• AWS HPC Blog – Engineering at the speed of thought: Accelerating complex processes with multi-agent AI and Synera (multi-agent RFQ prototype). Amazon Web Services, Inc.

• Siemens Digital Industries Software – How a leading South African manufacturer reduced RFQ response time (Valor BOM Connector case study). Siemens Blog Network

• ZBrain Insights – AI in quote management: Scope, integration, use cases, challenges and future outlook (quoting time reductions of up to 70 %). ZBrain

• McKinsey & Company – Powering the remanufacturing renaissance with AI (gen-AI can cut warranty costs 5–10 %). McKinsey & Company

• Deloitte – How Generative AI will transform Sourcing and Procurement Operations (efficiency gains across source-to-pay). deloitte.com