Europe's automotive and auto parts sector posted its fastest output growth since June 2021 in October, according to S&P Global's Europe Sector PMI data. For the manufacturing belt of Central and Eastern Europe — where carmaking anchors industrial output from Czechia and Slovakia to Poland, Hungary and Romania — the reading points to order books finally thickening after a long stretch of sluggish momentum.
The upturn has company beyond the auto industry. Deloitte's weekly global economic update puts the manufacturing component up 6% year on year, with automotives listed among the categories showing very strong growth — in line with computers and communications equipment (up 16.4%) and railway and shipbuilding (up 11.7%). For component makers serving several of those categories at once, the overlap is a welcome tailwind.
Investment money is following the momentum. Bytes Europe reports that auto component manufacturing in the U.S. and Canada brings $8.5 billion in total investment value across active projects — a sign that component demand is firming on both sides of the Atlantic rather than in Europe alone.
Yet the recovery is selective, and cost discipline has not gone away. Schaeffler's Q3 2026 presentation detailed plans to cut approximately 3,460 positions across Europe while targeting EUR 300 million in annual earnings improvements by 2030. The message for the wider supply base — much of it clustered in CEE — is that volume growth and restructuring can arrive in the same quarter, and capacity will be managed tightly even as output accelerates.
