Reconfiguring Semi-Peripherality: The Portuguese Automotive Sector amid Regional Bloc Competition and the Digital-Sustainable Transition

Résumé:

The automotive industry is undergoing a major restructuring driven by geopolitical pressures, digitalization of production and services and growing strategic centralization of control by OEMs. These transformations raise a particularly important question for semi-peripheral economies, whose integration into automotive value chains depends on external markets, technologies and corporate decision centres. This paper examines Portugal as an empirical case to assess whether current changes in the European and global automotive sector are reinforcing, destabilizing or partially reconfiguring its semi-peripheral position.
The analysis is grounded in the concept of semi-peripherality and draws on productive models analysis to examine how structural hierarchy, organizational control and technological change interact in the Portuguese automotive sector. It focuses on two subsectors, manufacturing and components, and asks three questions: how are they positioned within the European automotive landscape; how are firms responding to AI-induced transformations in production and coordination; and how do OEMs strategies shape opportunities for local upgrading or downgrading in supply chains?
The paper combines quantitative analysis of sectoral data from Eurostat, OECD, AFIA, Banco de Portugal and Instituto Nacional de Estatística with qualitative fieldwork based on semi-structured interviews with industry representatives, production managers and specialists in key enabling infrastructures, including batteries, hydrogen, data centres and energy systems. This mixed-method approach links macro-structural trends to firm-level adaptation strategies.
Preliminary findings indicate an uneven pattern of restructuring. Portugal’s automotive sector has expanded exports and employment and shows signs of repositioning in activities linked to batteries, powertrains, data centres and digital coordination. Moniz, Candeias and Boavida (2025) showed that most AI’s impacts start in non-core secondary activities. However, these advances coexist with persistent vulnerabilities, including dependence on a narrow range of export markets, low domestic R&D intensity and limited high-value-added companies. The paper argues that current transformations are not dismissing semi-peripherality but reshaping its conditions: they widen opportunities for upgrading while simultaneously deepening strategic dependence on parent firms and wider European industrial policy. The Portuguese case shows how smaller European automotive economies navigate these transitions towards new productive regimes under conditions of intensified geopolitical and technological turbulence.