{"id":1842,"date":"2025-09-03T11:48:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T09:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/automotive-aftermarket-additional-margin-through-tool-usage-contracts\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T16:29:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T15:29:06","slug":"automotive-aftermarket-additional-margin-through-tool-usage-contracts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/automotive-aftermarket-additional-margin-through-tool-usage-contracts\/","title":{"rendered":"Automotive Aftermarket: Additional margin through tool usage contracts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Industry:<\/em>
\nAutomotive Aftermarket<\/em><\/p>\n

Description<\/strong>
\nAn automotive Tier 1 supplier in Europe manufactures series products on tools that are partly owned by the OEMs. As a result, these products are not available for own distribution via the Independent Aftermarket (IAM). <\/p>\n

Objective
\n<\/strong>Negotiation and conclusion of tool usage agreements with OEMs in order to be able to market these products in the IAM.<\/p>\n

Generate additional margin in the aftermarket through tool usage contracts.<\/h3>\n

The project in brief:<\/strong>
\n– The independent aftermarket (IAM) as a lucrative part of the aftermarket
\n– OEM tool ownership blocks market access in the IAM
\n– Conclusion of tool usage agreements as a win-win for OEM and Tier 1 manufacturers<\/p>\n

Sales organization without access to products<\/strong>
\nAn Asian automotive Tier 1 group supplied independent distributors in EMEA with products from global production via the Italian-based sales organization (VO). These close-to-production products were sold in the independent aftermarket (IAM), the non-manufacturer-bound spare parts market, which is significantly larger than the manufacturer-bound original equipment service market (OES) with a share of around 60%. <\/p>\n

The problem was that VO did not have access to the series products manufactured in the European plants for distribution in the IAM, as some of these were manufactured on tools owned by the European OEM customers.<\/p>\n

Interim Manager (IM) Christian Lukas was commissioned by the management of the Tier 1 manufacturer to identify and implement solutions for profitably selling the products manufactured in Europe, which had considerable global sales potential, in the IAM.<\/p>\n

Analysis:<\/strong>
\nInvestments or license fees<\/p>\n

Christian Lukas calculated potential sales volumes, turnover and margins for the IAM sales channel based on the number of series products manufactured to date, an estimate of the failure rate and the distribution of sales volumes between OES and IAM over the product life cycle.<\/p>\n

The IM compared this with the necessary investment costs for in-house tools and, based on the return on investment (ROI), prioritized those product lines for which investment in in-house tools was worthwhile. He then implemented the rapid procurement of these tools. <\/p>\n

For the vast majority of products, however, the only option was to conclude a tool usage agreement (WNV), also known as a license agreement.<\/p>\n

Under this agreement, the OEM manufacturer grants the Tier 1 manufacturer the right to manufacture products on tools and machines owned by the OEM, which the Tier 1 manufacturer can then sell independently in the IAM. In return, the Tier 1 manufacturer undertakes to pay the OEM a license fee calculated per unit. <\/p>\n

Profitable additional revenue from license agreements<\/strong>
\nChristian Lukas successfully negotiated tool usage agreements with various automotive OEMs and achieved three key milestones for the commissioning Tier 1 company:<\/p>\n

Additional products close to series production could be manufactured on existing machines and tools with relatively little additional effort, resulting in higher capacity utilization.<\/p>\n

Global IAM sales opportunities were agreed with the OEMs so that non-European sales organizations could also access these products and sell them in IAM in their markets – with corresponding additional sales and margins.<\/p>\n

The license fees payable to the OEMs were more than compensated for by the significantly higher margin in the IAM compared to the series business, which led to an additional contribution to earnings.<\/p>\n

Christian Lukas’ in-depth and wide-ranging experience in the automotive aftermarket also paid off in the negotiations for tool usage agreements with the OEMs’ purchasing and aftermarket departments, which were conducted on an equal footing. He succeeded in convincing the OEMs that it is also in their interest to have a strong Tier 1 partner at their side in the long term in order to ensure the sustainable supply of high-quality products to the aftermarket and to jointly protect the market against low-quality products, imitators and counterfeits. <\/p>\n

By concluding the tool usage contracts, the commissioning Tier 1 company was able to generate considerable additional sales with a profitable margin from new products – not only in EMEA, but also globally.<\/p>\n<\/div>

Ask a question \/ contact us<\/span><\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OEM tools block access to the independent aftermarket. This case study shows how a Tier 1 manufacturer is opening up new markets and generating additional margin with tool usage contracts. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":1752,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fallbeispiele"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1842"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2315,"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842\/revisions\/2315"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cordillera-strategie.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}