Carmakers threaten Magna with a stop in orders

The car parts supplier Magna has come under considerable pressure from its own customers due to its planned takeover of Opel. The largest German car manufacturers are threatening to cancel their orders with Magna for fear that technological knowledge will be leaked to Russia. The conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung comments: "BMW, Daimler and VW are clearly facing the fact that in future they will have no futher innovative components such as electronic parts developed by Magna. The fear is that such know-how will then fall into the hands of their competitor Opel. For Magna, its customers' disapproval of its new role as carmaker has life-threatening proportions. Of course not all producers are going to cancel all their orders. But Magna is already in an extremely difficult situation. In the first half of the year the sales volume of the world's third largest supplier after Bosch and Denso shrank by almost one half to 5 billion euros. [Until now] those responsible for this drop have primarily been customers in America."

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