Archived Copies of Warranty Week

December 2002 to Today

Homebuilder Warranty Report: As happened in 2007, the warranty metrics of the U.S.-based single-family home builders seem to have hit a bit of a plateau in 2019. Unit sales and warranty claims are up, but all the other metrics are little-changed from 2018 levels. And now, it's hard to imagine how 2020 will turn out.
March 12, 2020
Louisville's Warranty Experts: Both GE Appliances and UPS Worldport are located there. Throw in nice weather, a good airport, and a central location, and you have all the ingredients needed to turn it into a major hub for warranty and service contract expertise.
November 14, 2019
Apple & Tesla Warranty Accounting: The third quarter numbers are coming in fast and furious now, and some investors and stock analysts are treating the warranty expense data as a leading indicator of a company's financial health. But there are limits to how quickly some bad numbers can turn into a trend or a scandal.
November 7, 2019
Extended Protection Plans: While warranty data is the starting point, warranty analytics is what drives the business. Warranty analytics can be used to create an intelligent extended protection plan that identifies the types of failures, which customers are most impacted by them, and what the root cause might be. This, in turn, also helps determine the right level of coverage to meet the customer's risk profile.
March 14, 2019
Asian Automotive Warranty Report: Honda had a bad year in 2016, and this year it was Toyota's turn to report dramatic increases in recall costs. They used to have the lowest automotive warranty costs in the world but now that title belongs to Hyundai, which has yet to see the impact of defective air bags or other rampant problems.
June 29, 2017
Honda's Warranty Expenses: Every major automaker gets their turn to suffer from massive recalls once in a while. So now it's Honda's turn. But is it possible that thanks to the apparently high cost of fixing airbag defects, Honda now has higher warranty costs per vehicle than GM?
July 2, 2015
Assurant Expert Services: While repairs are a huge part of aftermarket services, so are installations, assemblies, configuration and preventative maintenance. Assurant Solutions is putting them all under a single umbrella that it can offer to its retail clients who can in turn sell service to their end user customers.
August 30, 2012
Computer Warranty
Claims & Accruals: No news is good news as the computer industry's top warranty providers turn in predictable warranty expense reports. Despite economic turmoil, new product launches and multiple recent acquisitions, claims and accrual rates just aren't changing much.
September 16, 2010
New Home Warranties: One CEO recently said the worst of this cycle may be behind us. In terms of sales decreases and price declines, maybe so. But in terms of warranty costs, the worst is right now, as builders have less cash to pay for warranty work on units they sold at the end of the boom years. And then there's the question of how costly the defective Chinese drywall will turn out to be to replace.
September 24, 2009
Warranty in Financial Statements: Because warranty disclosures began appearing in annual reports less than seven years ago, it takes a bit of skill to hunt down the right data and turn it into meaningful percentages and ratios. So until the procedures are old enough to make it into the accounting textbooks, here's a step-by-step guide to how it's done, using one company's most recent disclosures as an example.
July 30, 2009
Worldwide Warranty Providers: With the attention of Americans turned towards long weekends at the beach, barbecues and mountain getaways, we turn our focus to ten well-known international brands that are among the few non-U.S.-based companies to reveal their warranty expenses.
July 3, 2008