Ineos CEO: January production restart the ‘best possible outcome’

Production restarting for Ineos Automotive in January is the “best possible outcome” the company could have experienced because there were “a number of outcomes that weren’t very palatable”, according to company CEO Lynn Calder.

Ineos was forced to halt production in September after a supplier, understood to be seat maker Recaro, filed for insolvency. Speaking at Autocar at the LA motor show, Calder said the issue was now resolved and the firm was working on ways to further shore up its supply chains but she believed “our production will be absolutely fine next year”.

“This particular issue is resolved and it is probably the best possible outcome actually that could have happened,” she said, crediting “major and strong collaboration” for solving the problem.

She said “there were a number of outcomes that weren’t very palatable, that had us down for much, much longer”, but “now we’re going to be back up in January, the least palatable outcomes are off the table. That’s why it’s the best possible outcome.”

Calder said it was “really hard” to set up a factory and supply chain, an operation make all the harder for Ineos because it did so during Covid and then a supply shortage.

“We’ve been in production for two years, and we came to the market during Covid and a global supply chain crisis,” she said. “We’ve got a pretty complex vehicle, some of which is bespoke, so it’s kind of easy for us to look at it and say we’re a little bit exposed here and there in some locations. 

“We don’t have two seat suppliers, for example, and that is just the world I live in right now. It’s not going to change overnight, because having multiple suppliers requires multiple supplier development and multiple supplier tools, and that’s not going to be within our gift for everything.

“We’ve got to get better, we’ve got to get more secure, and we will work on that, but that’s a years-long project. It’s not tomorrow, so the best we can do is work really, really hard with the suppliers that we have to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Calder said Ineos stocks were “running pretty dry, and lead times are getting longer”, particularly in Europe, but it had managed to get volume to the US, its biggest global market, just before the shutdown so stock has been maintained to an extent and deliveries able to continue.