Marchionne promotes young executives Lancia, Alfa get new CEOs; quality boss gets more to do Automotive News Europe / October 03, 2005 Advertisement TURIN - Fiat Auto CEO Sergio Marchionne has shuffled top executives at the Italian automaker for the fourth time in the last 12 months. * Antonio Baravalle becomes CEO of Alfa Romeo, replacing Karl-Heinz Kalbfell. Baravalle, 40, had been CEO of Lancia since November 2004. * Olivier Francois takes charge of Lancia. Francois, 44, joined Fiat Auto on September 12 as sales director of the Fiat brand. * Stefan Ketter, 45, becomes Fiat Auto head of manufacturing. * Kalbfell, 56, remains Maserati CEO. Fiat insiders say Marchionne is removing top managers who are not performing to his expectations and promoting young executives who have shown the ability to achieve their targets. In the past 11 months Baravalle has kept Lancia on a growth path despite being relatively new to the auto business. He joined Fiat Auto six years ago from Diageo, a UK-based beverage company that owns the Guinness beer and Johnnie Walker whiskey brands. Lancia revival At Lancia, Baravalle convinced Marchionne to add three new products: A Lancia variant of the planned Suzuki-Fiat medium SUV, a third generation of the Delta lower-medium car and a remake of the Fulvia coupe. This year Lancia expects to sell about 122,000 units, up from 115,000 units in 2004. The new models should help Lancia achieve 200,000 annual sales by 2010. Francois joined Fiat Auto from Citroen Italy on September 12 to become sales director of the Fiat brand. He held the job for a week before moving to Lancia. In his three years as head of Citroen Italy, Francois boosted the French carmaker's sales in Italy to 146,939 units last year from 65,750 units in 2001, more than doubling Citroen's Italian market share to 6.4 percent from 3 percent. New roles Kalbfell joined Fiat as head of Alfa Romeo on January 1, 2005, from the BMW group, where his last assignment was Rolls-Royce CEO. He added the title of Maserati CEO on April 1. Kalbfell retains his job at Maserati and also remains in charge of technical and commercial cooperation between Alfa and Maserati. Last week it was unclear whether Kalbfell would accept his demotion from Alfa Romeo or leave Fiat. As part of the changes Ketter gets more responsibility. Fiat Auto's head of quality now also is head of manufacturing at the carmaker. He replaces Antonio Bene, who will be assigned to another position within Fiat. Ketter joined Fiat in April 2004 from Volkswagen of America, where he was executive director of quality and engineering. Ketter's promotion is seen as an attempt by Marchionne to tackle Fiat's chronic inability to meet launch targets.
