Mercedes-Benz: in talks with suppliers over rare earth 'buffers'

By Christoph Steitz

RASTATT, Germany (Reuters) -Mercedes-Benz is talking to its top suppliers about building rare earth stockpiles even though the carmaker has not seen any impact from a shortage that has caused some suppliers to shut down plants and production lines.

"We have learnt a lot from the semiconductor situation in the automotive industry and are constantly ... looking at what risk portfolio we still have in the supply chain," Joerg Burzer, Mercedes-Benz's board member in charge of production said.

"We are of course in constant dialogue with our suppliers and of course we also discuss with them what the best tool is for risk management and the topic of physical buffers naturally plays a role here," he told journalists at a roundtable.

Earlier on Wednesday, Europe's auto supplier association CLEPA said several plants and production lines had been shut down due to a shortage of rare earths caused by China imposing restrictions on exports, warning of further outages to come.

Burzer said that while Mercedes-Benz was currently not affected by the shortage it was closely monitoring the situation and in constant dialogue with its tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers to mitigate the situation.

(Reporting by Christoph SteitzEditing by Madeline Chambers and Matthias Williams)