Industry 4.0 and the global automobile context

: the german situation and the specific BMW’s case until the BMW and Daimler’s Joint Venture

Abstract

The following thesis, to which was chosen a case study format, is focused on BMW, a successful German car maker for the middle-high budget customers. Vehicles electrification, a pressure that came from some customers and also by strong inter governmental legislation, has brought even more challenges than electrification it self since technology and mobility as a service emerged in the market thanks to the good it could do for the environment. Thanks to all these developments, BMW and the automobile industry in a general way, felt the beginning of a crisis for which the Germans didn’t bring a good reputation from the past, with the diesel scandal that occurred. Hereupon, BMW presents a very complete case of business adaptive strategies since it crossed huge difficulties and huge doubts when compared with any other carmaker non-german. Not expecting this kind of change, production solutions, strategic locations, strategic partnerships and governmental incentives had to be studied in order to satisfy a target that, at the beginning, BMW didn’t know what the reactions would be.

Date of Award	26 Jan 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Ricardo Reis (Supervisor)