Kickstart: Put a bow on it

The "big bows on cars for Christmas" industry is having an off year.

According to Joe Pinsker at the Wall Street Journal, car bow sales are down 35 percent this season at King Size Bows, a Costa Mesa, Calif., supplier of giant PVC bows. The same is true at most of the bow retailers the Journal spoke with.

(And no, I didn't realize that there were businesses specializing in selling those bows either.)

A Lexus dealer told Pinsker that about 15 percent of the holiday-season sales at his dealership are gifts, but with overall car sales down in 2022, it makes sense that there are fewer giant bows in demand.

Car bows have shown up in end-of-the-year marketing for automakers and dealers for about 20 years, Pinsker writes.

Magna International Inc. got itself an early Christmas present with a deal to buy a safety electronics company that had slipped out of its acquisitive grasp in 2021.

The Canadian auto supplier will spend $1.5 billion to buy Veoneer Active Safety, a maker of radars, cameras and lidar, and the restraint-control systems unit, including electronics for airbags and seat belts.

With the acquisition, Magna expects its advanced drive assistance systems (ADAS) business to grow from $550 million in sales in 2021 to $3 billion by 2024.

"We expect our combined product lines to have enhanced experience and scale," Magna CEO Swamy Kotagiri said on a call with analysts. "We should be among the leaders in camera and radar technology, which would address two of the largest total addressable markets in ADAS."

You can find the full story from our sister paper Automotive News here.

Veoneer, spun off from Swedish airbag maker Autoliv in 2018, had been an acquisition target for Magna in 2021, when it was outbid by technology company Qualcomm Inc. Qualcomm was interested only in Veoneer's Arriver software business, though, so it sold off the rest of the company to private investment firm SSW Partners, which now has made the sale to Magna.

It's centennial celebration time for automotive fuel systems supplier TI Fluid Systems as it marks 100 years since its precursor company, Bundy Corp., opened in Detroit.

Now a maker of everything in an auto fuel system from the gas nozzle to the engine (including multilayer fuel, coolant and hydraulic tubes plus blow molded fuel tanks), the company got its big break when it began supplying metal fuel lines for Henry Ford's Model T.

Expertise in metal tubing led Bundy to global growth, with rapid expansions following World War II. In 1988, TI Group bought Bundy, and in the coming years, the Bundy division adopted plastics for tubing.

TI made its big shift into being a total fuel system supplier in 1999 when it purchased blow molding fuel tank maker Walbro. The TI auto business was spun off from TI Group in the early 2000s. It is now publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange.

TI is No. 17 among North American blow molders, according to Plastics News ranking data.

"At every stage of its history, [TI's] story has been one of ingenuity, innovation and adapting to the times," President and CEO Hans Dieltjens said in a news release.