Archived Copies of Warranty Week

December 2002 to Today

Thirteenth Annual Product Warranty Report: As the latest charts clearly show, American manufacturers are spending less on warranty than they used to. But is it because of better products, less costly repairs, or fewer sales? Now that the 2015 warranty expense data collection is almost complete, it's time to figure out why claims and accruals are declining.
March 24, 2016
Big Data at WCM: Rather than a data warehouse, which is built to spec and then filled in an orderly fashion, WCM keynote speaker Richard Vermillion wants to fill a "data lake" with information and then figure out how it might be useful. For warranty and service contract industry professionals, this will allow new sources of data to help analysts predict what happens to products in the field, and how and why they fail.
March 10, 2016
Heavy Truck Warranties: Six companies have 12 brand names that account for almost all the heavy trucks carrying freight on the highways and motorways of North America and Europe. And while it's not possible to figure out how much warranty costs on a per-truck basis, all six parent companies do disclose their total worldwide warranty expenses.
September 3, 2015
Materials Handling Equipment Warranty Report: Though it's difficult to figure out who's in and who's out of this industry, there's no doubt that they're reducing their warranty expense rates to the lowest percentage of sales revenue seen since at least 2003.
June 11, 2015
Warranty Accruals per Vehicle: While we can't say who builds a better car, we can figure out which automakers are budgeting for the lowest warranty costs per vehicle. Worldwide, Honda leads and Daimler lags, but the order of the six OEMs between them is somewhat surprising.
July 7, 2011
Warranty Cost per Vehicle: If one has a figure for warranty accruals and for annual sales, one can quickly calculate an estimate of what a given automaker expects to spend on warranty claims over the life of its vehicles. And better yet, all the complexities of warranty durations, local currencies, labor and parts cost are built into the estimate.
July 16, 2008
Worldwide Computer Warranties: Thanks to exact data for U.S. product warranties and good data for worldwide market shares, we can estimate a worldwide figure of $12.3 billion for IT hardware warranties and $4.9 billion for PC warranties. With mobile phones, however, the precision drops because so much of the industry is based in Asia and Europe, where warranty data remains relatively scarce.
June 5, 2007
Extended Warranty Profits: For many manufacturers, the sale of extended warranties contributes heavily to net income. But only a handful of companies have made the financial disclosures needed to figure out how important it really is to them.
October 26, 2004
Don't TREAD On Me: Estimates of the cost of TREAD Act compliance vary all the way from the U.S. government's own $89 million figure up to a $1.7 billion estimate recently published by AMR Research. While small manufacturers continue to count their actual costs, the government continues to insist those costs will be close to zero.
November 3, 2003