COop of theater at Stellantis. Sales in free fall after years of success: it only took a few months for Stellantis shareholders to remove the intractable boss of the automobile group, Carlos Tavares, whose resignation was announced on Sunday evening.
The board of directors had already suspended Carlos Tavares by announcing his retirement at the beginning of October and launched a succession process, but “disagreements” accelerated his resignation. “The company's board of directors, meeting today under the chairmanship of John Elkann, accepted the resignation of Carlos Tavares,” the group said in a press release.
This decision is the result of “different points of view” between the board of directors and the manager, explained Henri de Castries, administrator of Stellantis. John Elkann, heir to the group's main shareholder, the Italian Agnelli family, takes the helm of a new temporary executive committee.
The process of appointing the group's new CEO, managed by a special committee of the board of directors, is already “well underway” and “will be completed during the first half of 2025”, the group stressed.
Decline in sales
Coming from Renault, Carlos Tavares made a name for himself by turning around the PSA group (Peugeot-Citroën) from 2014, by cutting costs. He then succeeded, apparently, in the mega-merger bet between PSA and FCA (Fiat-Chrysler): since the creation of this group with fourteen brands in 2021 – from Peugeot to Fiat via Chrysler and Maserati – Stellantis has set a string of records in net profits and quickly turned to hybrid and electric cars.
But the Stellantis group coughed in the first half of 2024, with net profit halved, before seeing its margins collapse in the face of more serious difficulties than expected in North America, with vehicles of criticized quality and prices considered too high.
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Kangaroo of the day
Answer
Carlos Tavares had to abandon his sacred “double-digit” operating margin objective for the year at the end of September, which placed him far ahead of his competitors, and justified his planned salary of 36.5 million euros for the year 2023. The drop in production in many factories did not fail to worry employees and governments, as in Italy, home of Fiat, where thousands of demonstrators demanded accountability in mid-October.
If in France, management assured last week that no factory closures were planned in the short term despite an expected drop in production, in the United Kingdom, the group, on the other hand, announced the closure of its factory in Luton, employing over 1,100 people in north London.
