U.S. automakers are steadily bringing manufacturing back online following COVID-19-related factory closures in the U.S. General Motors Co. CFO Dhivya Suryadevara has said the company is "still targeting to be at normal capacity end-of-June, or sooner if possible." Meanwhile, Ford Motor Co. COO Jim Farley has indicated that "by July 6 we will expect to have all of our U.S. plants operating at pre-COVID patterns."

While both will be able to control the start-up of their own facilities, they may yet suffer challenges from the reopening of their suppliers, as flagged in Panjiva's research of June 4.

There is also the implicit challenge of customer demand being there to absorb the vehicles that are produced. Panjiva's analysis of official data shows that U.S. sales of domestically produced vehicles fell by 28.7% year over year in May, marking an improvement from a 44.6% drop a month earlier. 

Notably, sales of foreign-produced vehicles only fell by 17.1% in May compared to 45.0% the prior month, in part helped by a dip in sales of light trucks of just 5.9%. The latter may reflect the availability of previously delivered vehicles providing stock compared to a shortfall from U.S. factories.

Inventories of foreign-built autos may be in decline with U.S. seaborne imports of vehicles having fallen by 50.9% year over year in April and May combined, Panjiva's data shows. That followed a 21.2% slide in the first quarter. 

Among the major automakers, the fastest reversal was experienced by Mazda Motor Corp. whole imports in the past two months fell by 85.2% compared to a 16.8% increase in the first quarter. That was followed by Subaru Corp., which saw a decline of 31.8% in the past two months from a 47.5% surge in the first quarter.

The least affected has been Kia Motors Corp., with a 17.1% dip in the past two months versus an 18.2% slump in the first quarter.  

Christopher Rogers is a senior researcher at Panjiva, which is a business line of S&P Global Market Intelligence, a division of S&P Global Inc. This content does not constitute investment advice, and the views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Links are current at the time of publication. S&P Global Market Intelligence is not responsible if those links are unavailable later.