In Brazil, a relatively buoyant market, VW is vying with Fiat to become the market leader.
Alas, it may take more than bureaucratic fiat to transform Japan into a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity.
It tendered directly for houses (a process riddled with corruption and kickbacks), assigning them by fiat to beneficiaries.
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Or it could do an initial public offering for Chrysler, forcing Fiat to vie with investors for the shares.
Peugeot has pioneered such links in the past, in long-standing deals with Renault and Fiat to produce engines and van bodies.
There was already a contract for Fiat to supply 20-30 thousand engines for the SX4, which would be assembled in a factory in Hungary.
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Perhaps no one is better suited for the challenge of reintroducing Fiat to the U.S. than Soave, who grew up bridging the Italian and American cultures.
Why not allow, say, a BMW dealer to open a vehicular boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills or Fiat to showcase its models from a small storefront in the urban-hip Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago?
Short of a government bail-out, the obvious solution would be for Fiat to get rid of the car business which, as a smallish car maker in a world dominated by huge global groups, is increasingly an anomaly.
Fleet sales, which account for 27% of monthly sales, fell one percent on weaker rental accounts, while sales to commercial accounts rose for a 15 consecutive month, up 31%. (Read Fiat To Take Chrysler Stake To 57%, Plans To Buy 6% From Treasury).
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Fiat also has an option to sell the remaining 80% of Fiat Auto to GM from next year.
After having recently repaid large chunks of bailout money to the Federal government, with CEO Sergio Marchionne announcing that Fiat plans to increase its stake in the Detroit car company, Chrysler grew its May sales 10% from a year ago to 115, 393.
By handing her the keys to Fiat's brand-new North American business, Marchionne entrusted Soave with a crucial element in the risky alliance between Fiat and Chrysler he hopes to turn into an automotive empire on the scale of Toyota, General Motors and Volkswagen.
This may eventually lead to a merger of Ifil with Fiat, opening the door to an outside investor being brought in to rescue the Fiat Auto division, which is labouring under a heavy dependence on the Italian market, a lack of scale and earlier diversification into difficult emerging markets such as Brazil.
At a marathon presentation in Turin of his five-year plan for Fiat on April 21st he confirmed, as expected, that he is planning to separate Fiat's other businesses from Fiat Auto as a precursor to creating a combined entity with Chrysler.
Fiat wants to avoid cutting its Italian workforce any more than it has to.
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Fiat hopes to maintain its winning streak by introducing over 20 new models by 2010.
Last year, for instance, Fiat failed to find a buyer for Magneti Marelli, its struggling car-components business.
With the new strategy, Marchionne said Fiat hopes to break even in Europe by 2015 or 2016.
If Fiat fails to honour this debt, it is unlikely to get any more money from its exasperated lenders or any others.
Fiat needs to make sure that it does not repeat the mistakes that were made in DaimlerChrysler's so-called merger of equals, though.
With a plethora of facelifts and new models scheduled for the coming year, Fiat seems to have learned something from errors past.
Already, Italy's Fiat plans to build many models from a single chassis and sell them to developing countries from Bolivia to Bangladesh.
In the past, Fiat tried to dampen this volatility by diversifying geographically, and particularly by expanding into emerging markets such as Brazil and China.
Fiat wants to take advantage of Mazda powertrain technology, although the strong yen and related higher manufacturing costs are a down side to the deal.
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But first Fiat needs to lay down roots in the U.S. The key was gaining access to Chrysler's 2, 300-dealer distribution network through the bankruptcy deal.
Fiat and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne told Reuters at the Detroit auto show that Fiat plans to introduce an Alfa Romeo 4C sports car to the U.S. market late this year.
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By the end of the year, Fiat expects to increase its Chrysler holdings to 58.5% by satisfying an Obama administration requirement that it begin U.S. manufacturing of a fuel-efficient Chrysler using Fiat underpinnings.
When Fiat wanted to launch a new car for emerging markets, it assembled a team of engineers from Argentina, Brazil, Poland and Turkey, all of whom had experience designing cars for poor roads.
Imposing reporting requirements on these deposits through regulatory fiat threatens to drive significant investments out of our economy by undermining the rules Congress has set in place specifically to attract it, and at exactly the time when our economy can least afford it.
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