Tuam-based driverless car tech company Valeo’s profits are rising

Pre-tax profit for a Co Galway company at the forefront of driverless car technology has more than ninefold in 2021 to £25.43million.

onnaught Electronics, trading as Valeo Vision Systems, saw profits jump as revenue fell 4.5% from €207.48 million to €198.18 million.

Crucial to the increase in earnings were €25.56 million in dividend income from subsidiaries.

Before including dividend income received, offset against net interest payments of €1.35 million, the Tuam-based company’s operating profit fell by 71.5 percent from €4.28 million to €1.22 million.

The French-owned company is one of the largest private manufacturing employers in the west of Ireland, employing 795 people at the end of December 2021. Valeo Tuam is a group competence center for vision systems and automated parking, producing physical hardware and generating intellectual property of software with artificial intelligence.

The directors state that their products and systems “contribute to intuitive driving.”

The products developed by the R&D center in Tuam are produced at Valeo sites in Germany, Hungary, Mexico and China.

In November 2020, the company announced up to 60 job cuts, and in 2021 the company’s workforce was reduced by 133 from 928 to 795.

At the end of 2021, half of the workforce was engaged in R&D, and in 2021, the company’s R&D expenditure totaled EUR 62.75 million. This was followed by R&D expenditures of €73.58 million in 2020.

The company was expected to increase its R&D spending in 2022, with a note accompanying the financial statements showing that the company had committed to spend €85.97 million on R&D in 2022.

The figures show that despite the downsizing, personnel costs increased from €50.98 million to €52.16 million in 2021. Directors’ salaries increased 21 percent from €368,213 to €446,659.

Profit for 2021 includes non-cash depreciation and amortization costs of €6.64 million. The shareholder funds amounted to €61.47 million.

Valeo bought the site in 2007.