Rutronik: in close contact with the automotive industry

With its Automotive Business Unit, Rutronik enhances its role as an intermediary and facilitator of relationships between OEMs, first and second-tier suppliers and manufacturers of electronic components for the automotive sector.

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rutronik smart car automotive

For Rutronik, a German distributor of electronic components, the automotive sector has been around for a long time: it was in 1973 that Helmut Rudel founded the company in Ispringen, a small town just a few kilometres from Stuttgart, in the heart of the land that has seen the birth of brands such as Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and Daimler, among others. Over the years, the contribution of electronics to the car has grown and, in order to fully grasp its potential, Rutronik has opened its in-house Automotive Business Unit. The year is 2014 and the new division is headed by Uwe Rahn."Rutronik has always been in close contact with the automotive sector, which was already worth around 40 percent of global sales in 2014," explains Rahn, who is still head of the division. "In addition, we have gained a deep understanding of the automotive market, its needs, methodologies and required standards, a wealth of expertise that we decided to fully exploit globally by channelling it into a dedicated business unit." Electrification, Adas and autonomous driving have all contributed to bringing more and more electronics on board vehicles, so much so that today around half of Rutronik's global turnover comes from the automotive sector.

Networking with car players

Focusing on the sector also means actively following the transformations that are affecting it and keeping pace with them: the evolution towards electric and hybrid systems, the electrification of vehicles, the growing interconnection of the car with the external environment are profound changes that impact on the entire design process and on the development of electronic components and that require in-depth knowledge of products and applications even on the part of a distributor.

"The experts in Rutronik's Automotive Business Unit not only have extensive knowledge of their products, but through working with customers, they also gain expertise that helps them understand theirapplications ," adds Rahn. "This means that customers see Abu as an advisor and intermediary, who understands their challenges and provides them with the right information and recommendations on components, as well as connecting them with other experts, whether it's the component manufacturer or an external consultant from our network. Through our networking activities, we maintain close ties with tier one manufacturers, component suppliers and service providers, both design and manufacturing."

Rutronik Automotive Business Unit: a reference for suppliers and customers

Precisely because of its good positioning in the automotive sector, Rutronik organised its first Automotive Congress in 2018 in Germany and the success of the event then led the company to propose it in October 2019 also in Italy, in Turin. Here, too, Rutronik confirmed its ability to bring together authoritative market players, both among car and subsystem manufacturers and electronic component suppliers. Stressing the peculiarity of this effective approach to the market is Pino Cosenza, Managing Director of Rutronik Italy, who is responsible for the opening of the subsidiary in our country in 2004: "Our strategy is to pay more attention to suppliers, towards whom we must have a commitment, a concrete commitment of a certain kind, and at the same time be recognised by customers as 'specialists' of that supplier and gain the image of distributors with whom we must have a preferential relationship". In Italy Rutronik started operating with a very small customer base but with a wide portfolio of suppliers, today, as Cosenza explains, the commitment is to continue to expand the customer base based on a more restricted list of suppliers: "We still remain a broadline distributor, because one of our strengths is being able to cover most of the customer's bill of materials, who can find all the necessary products with us, but who receive, for some of them, something extra: ad hoc logistics management, special support in order management, specific know-how".


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