There are executives in the automotive industry whose careers can be reconstructed through the cars they launched. Ugo Frigerio’s career is better understood through the things motorists rarely see.
The carpet underneath their feet, the insulation behind a dashboard, the material lining a wheel arch, the foam inside a seat and the thermal shielding underneath a vehicle are among thousands of components that have to arrive at an assembly plant in precisely the right specification, sequence and quantity before a Toyota, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Ford or Isuzu can leave a South African production line.
Frigerio has spent more than three decades inside that less visible part of the automotive industry.
He joined Feltex in February 1990, not as an engineer or production manager, but in human resources. After completing a BA Honours degree at the University of Natal and an MPhil at the University of Warwick in Britain, he became divisional HR manager at Feltex and, in 1996, group HR manager. Two years later he crossed from managing people into managing factories, taking responsibility for Feltex Foam Mouldings and Feltex Foam Converting. In October 2005, he was appointed managing director of Feltex Automotive. Following a subsequent restructuring of the businesses, he became chief executive of KAP’s Automotive Components division in 2014.
It is an unusual route to the top of a manufacturing company, but the length of his tenure has given Frigerio a perspective that relatively few executives still active in South Africa’s automotive industry possess. He has worked through the expansion years of domestic vehicle manufacturing, the global financial crisis, successive automotive industrial policies, the development of South Africa as an export production base and, more recently, the arrival of Chinese manufacturers and the transition towards electrification.
The Feltex he eventually came to lead was itself an old industrial company. Its origins date to 1935. By the time Frigerio became managing director of its automotive operations in 2005, however, it was already becoming something much more sophisticated than a textile manufacturer.
KAP’s 2005 accounts show an automotive operation spanning leather, interior trim and acoustic components, polyurethane products, foam conversion, catalytic-converter materials and a joint venture producing automotive acoustics and thermal-management components. During that year alone, Feltex Automotive invested R39 million acquiring production facilities and another R26 million improving efficiency. New vehicle programmes under preparation included the Toyota Corolla and Mercedes-Benz C-Class.
When Frigerio assumed control, therefore, he inherited a business whose fortunes were increasingly connected to a fundamental feature of modern automotive manufacturing: a vehicle manufacturer does not really manufacture an entire vehicle.
It assembles an extraordinarily complicated supply chain.
For component manufacturers, that creates both opportunity and vulnerability. Winning a component programme can provide production for the five, seven or sometimes ten years of a vehicle generation. Losing one can remove years of anticipated volume. A supplier has to invest in machinery and tooling before the first customer vehicle rolls off the assembly line, meet international quality requirements, integrate its production planning with the manufacturer and deliver components just in time and, increasingly, just in sequence.
A delayed carpet can stop a vehicle factory just as effectively as a missing engine.
Feltex built itself around this reality.
Its plants were positioned around South Africa’s automotive manufacturing centres: Durban, Pretoria, Gqeberha and East London. The company says its information systems interface directly with OEM production-planning systems, allowing components to be synchronized with vehicle assembly. Today its operations manufacture products ranging from carpets, underlays, dash and engine-room insulation and textile wheel-arch liners to seat foam, headrests, armrests, sports bars, side steps and tonneau and roller covers.
Frigerio’s years running the company have consequently been less about producing a single breakthrough product than continually securing a position inside successive generations of vehicles.
The numbers reveal the scale of that progression.
In 2010, five years after he became managing director, Feltex Automotive reported approximately R880 million in revenue. The preceding financial crisis had pushed operating profit down to R17.8 million in 2009 before it recovered to almost R50 million in 2010.
The company that Frigerio runs today is considerably larger.
Feltex generated R2.65 billion in revenue in KAP’s 2024 financial year and R2.43 billion in FY2025. Its 2025 EBITDA was R296 million and operating profit R166 million. KAP says Feltex now operates 19 manufacturing plants across South Africa.
That growth did not come simply from building more of the same components.
One recurring feature of the Feltex strategy has been the use of international partnerships to bring global automotive technology into a South African manufacturing platform.
One of the longest is the relationship with what is today Autoneum. The collaboration traces its origins to the 1980s, when the Swiss Rieter group supported Feltex in manufacturing automotive dampers. A formal joint venture was established in 1997. The resulting operation subsequently expanded into lightweight acoustic and thermal-management components including underfloor and under-engine shields.
Frigerio eventually spent two decades on the board of the Rieter Feltex and later Autoneum Feltex joint venture.
Another partnership is Feltex Fehrer, majority-owned by KAP Automotive with German automotive supplier F.S. Fehrer holding 49 per cent. It manufactures polyurethane seat pads and related moulded products, giving Feltex access to international seat-foam technology while retaining manufacturing inside South Africa.
The same strategy appeared again in 2022.
Feltex acquired a minority interest in Auria South Africa, creating a joint venture with global automotive interiors supplier Auria Solutions. The partnership operates from an 11,200-square-metre manufacturing facility in East London producing flooring systems, dash insulators, trunk trim and parcel shelves using processes including compression moulding, polyurethane back-foaming, high-frequency welding, waterjet cutting and injection moulding.
Frigerio described the attraction at the time as combining Feltex’s local capabilities with Auria’s global manufacturing and technical knowledge at a point when the industry was moving towards new technologies and production methods.
The formula has become characteristic of Feltex: manufacture locally, but connect that manufacturing capability to international technology.
Frigerio also pushed the business beyond the factory gate.
In 2016, KAP Automotive acquired Autovest for R560 million. Autovest owned automotive-accessory businesses including Maxe, Rhino Linings, Auto Armor and other operations serving dealerships and fitment centres. Competition Commission records show that KAP saw the transaction as a means of extending its automotive activities into accessories, while Autovest gained the financial backing of a listed industrial group.
The acquisition altered the balance of the automotive division. Feltex was heavily exposed to vehicles while they were being manufactured; the Autovest businesses provided exposure to vehicles after they left the production line.
KAP’s 2016 strategy documents described an automotive operation supplying components across all seven South African OEMs while reaching the aftermarket through a network then numbering about 130 franchised fitment centres. The group invested another R71 million that year in technology for new vehicle programmes.
This combination also reduced one of the inherent risks of automotive component manufacturing: dependence upon individual manufacturers and individual models.
That risk has never disappeared.
Feltex’s most recent financial results provide a reminder. South African vehicle assembly volumes fell 13 per cent during KAP’s 2025 financial year, from 642,092 to 557,516 vehicles. KAP attributed part of the decline to production constraints at two manufacturers, including a model changeover at one OEM and technical problems at another.
Feltex revenue fell 8 per cent to R2.43 billion. EBITDA declined 21 per cent to R296 million and operating profit dropped 37 per cent to R166 million. Return on capital employed fell from 17.6 per cent to 10.8 per cent.
For a supplier, those figures demonstrate an uncomfortable reality of the business. A component manufacturer can operate efficiently and still be affected immediately when a customer’s assembly line slows down.
That dependence increasingly occupies Frigerio beyond Feltex.
He is president of the National Association of Automotive Component and Allied Manufacturers, NAACAM, placing him at the centre of South Africa’s debate over what happens to its automotive manufacturing base as the global industry changes.
His tenure as president stretches back at least to the 2020/21 NAACAM executive committee, and members returned him as president for the association’s 2026/27 term.
The second role makes Frigerio something more than the chief executive of a large supplier.
He now represents an industry trying to preserve—and deepen—the domestic manufacturing ecosystem upon which companies such as Feltex depend.
South Africa’s automotive model has for years rested on a bargain between global manufacturers, local suppliers and government industrial policy. International OEMs manufacture vehicles in South Africa, much of the output is exported, government provides production incentives, and component manufacturers are expected to progressively increase the amount of value created locally.
The country’s Automotive Masterplan 2035 was intended to push that model further, particularly through higher localization, increased production, employment and transformation.
Progress has been uneven.
In 2026, NAACAM appeared before Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Trade, Industry and Competition with Frigerio among the delegation. The association warned that automotive component manufacturing faced deindustrialization risks and that key Masterplan targets were falling short. It called for measures to improve domestic vehicle-market conditions, increase production volumes and raise local content.
Those concerns become more important as the industry moves towards electric vehicles.
Electrification is sometimes described principally as a change of propulsion: batteries and electric motors replacing fuel tanks and internal-combustion engines. For component manufacturers, the transformation is more complicated. Some components disappear, others change, vehicles require different thermal and acoustic solutions, new materials become important and international manufacturers increasingly expect suppliers to meet tighter sustainability requirements.
The competitive geography is changing as well.
Chinese manufacturers have become increasingly important in the South African new-vehicle market, but much of that growth has so far come through imported vehicles. For the component industry, selling more cars in South Africa does not necessarily strengthen South African manufacturing if those vehicles arrive fully built from overseas.
That distinction—between the size of the vehicle market and the size of the vehicle manufacturing industry—now sits near the centre of the debate Frigerio is helping to lead through NAACAM.
His own company demonstrates why.
Feltex’s competitive advantage is not simply that it knows how to manufacture a carpet or mould a piece of polyurethane. Those products can be manufactured elsewhere. Its position rests on being physically embedded around South African assembly plants, supplying bulky components for which proximity matters, integrating with OEM production schedules and combining local manufacturing with technology obtained through international partnerships.
KAP explicitly identifies the light but bulky nature of many Feltex products as one reason they remain particularly suited to domestic manufacturing. It also points to longstanding relationships with OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers and international technology partnerships as competitive advantages.
That business model works when South Africa builds vehicles.
It becomes considerably more difficult if the country increasingly consumes vehicles manufactured elsewhere.
This may explain why Frigerio’s career has gradually moved from managing one component manufacturer to advocating for an industrial ecosystem.
When he entered Feltex’s HR department in 1990, South Africa’s automotive industry was still largely protected behind tariffs and sanctions and concentrated heavily on the domestic market. When he moved into operations in 1998, the industry was beginning its transition towards globally integrated production. When he became managing director in 2005, export manufacturing was accelerating and new global vehicle programmes were bringing investment into South African plants.
Twenty-one years later, the problem has changed again.
The country is no longer trying merely to establish whether it can manufacture vehicles to international standards; its factories have already demonstrated that. The question is whether South Africa can preserve sufficient production scale, increase the value created by domestic suppliers and move those capabilities into electric and new-energy vehicles while global automotive investment is being redistributed.
Few active South African component executives have watched that entire transition from inside the same company.
Frigerio has.
The trajectory from human-resources manager to factory operator, divisional managing director, automotive-components chief executive and eventually president of the industry’s manufacturers’ association is therefore more than an unusual corporate career.
It mirrors the maturation of South Africa’s component industry itself.
Feltex now sits behind hundreds of thousands of vehicles assembled every year, its components disappearing beneath carpets, dashboards, seats and bodywork before those vehicles reach their owners. KAP says the business currently operates 19 manufacturing plants and supplies components for an OEM production market measured at more than half a million vehicles a year.
For most motorists, neither Feltex nor Ugo Frigerio will ever be visible on the vehicle.
That has always been the nature of the component business.
The greater test facing Frigerio after more than 36 years at Feltex is whether the manufacturing capability built behind South Africa’s cars can remain there as the car itself changes.
