Warranty Week Newsletter Archives

SunPower just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August, leaving behind ongoing 25-year product warranties, for which its suppliers are now on the hook. On the industry level, it seems that the claims rate exceeding the accrual rate is becoming a concerning new norm.

The first annual Warranty Innovation Awards were bestowed on five recipients at the Extended Warranty & Service Contract Innovations conference in Chicago this week. We caught up with the winners and learned their best practices for success in the warranty and service contract industry.

Hyundai and Kia had another tough year, marked by recalls of millions of their vehicles. On the back of a 2022 also filled with recalls, the warranty expenses of the two South Korean vehicle manufacturers are higher than ever. Tata, on the other hand, has become consistent in its warranty accounting, years after its acquisition of Jaguar Land Rover.

Some manufacturers defy categorization into an industry group. Many of them still offer product warranties, for goods including vapes, exercise equipment, jewelry, oil and gas infrastructure, water management, domestic robots, coolers, body cameras, and tactical gear.

Many of the familiar names in the U.S.-based telecom equipment industry have gone bankrupt, been acquired, or gone private in the past decade, leading to a decline in the industry's total warranty expenses. However, based on the dropping warranty expense rates since 2018, it seems that the companies that remain are spending a lower proportion of their sales revenue on warranty expenses than ever before.

For this report, we're presenting 21 years of warranty expense data for the computer, consumer electronics, semiconductor, data storage, and peripherals industries. All but semiconductors have seen totals fall over the past two decades, due to the growing market share of internationally-based companies, as well as some key players such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google not reporting their warranty costs.

While General Electric used to dominate the U.S.-based power generation equipment industry, many renewable energy manufacturers have emerged into the market in the past decade. Some of them offer warranties longer than they've existed as companies, and they report a lot of changes of estimate and large fluctuations in annual warranty expenses, often without much explanation.

The pandemic didn't impact the building trades nearly as much as the housing bubble collapse and subsequent recession did back in 2008. If anything, the pandemic drummed up business for the majority of these manufacturers. The warranty expenses among these building trade industries didn't change much from 2022 to 2023, but their proportion of all U.S. product warranty expenses did, thanks to shrinkage in the high tech sector.