Mar. 1, 2022—The American automotive aftermarket industry is booming.This according to the Automotive Aftermarket Suppliers Association president and chief operating officer Paul McCarthy, who calls it unprecedented AASA Global Summit in Coral Gables, Florida.
“Welcome to the boom. This has been a truly unprecedented boom that we’ve seen in the U.S.,” McCarthy said, as reported by Auto Service World.
His findings come from data gathered in a graph showing positive year-over-year growth from the “big four” parts retailers—Advance Auto Parts, AutoZone, O’Reilley and GPC, which owns the NAPA brand—whose third quarter with growth hit 23 per cent higher than the same time in 2020.
“If pre-COVID I was telling you these are the kind of growth rates we’d see the next couple of years, none of you would have believed me. I wouldn’t have believed me. These guys wouldn’t believe,” he said during his presentation at the AASA Global Summit.
This is good news for investors who have long seen the automotive aftermarket as a reliable source of growth in the automotive industry.
“We’re kind of a predictable cash-generating machine,” McCarthy, adding,“There’s no doubt that the last two years have been extraordinarily challenging from a supplier perspective. From a market perspective, this is quite literally probably the best of times from a pace of growth [perspective] that we’ve ever seen in the U.S. in at least the last 60 years”
