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Automaker moves to revive Dodge and Chrysler labels after sales plummeted in 2024, leading to the departure of Carlos Tavares

Jeep is reviving its Cherokee-sized SUV. Dodge is bringing back the gas-engine version of its Charger muscle car. And Ram is hitting pause on its all-electric pickup truck.

In the weeks since the departure of former CEO Carlos Tavares, executives at global automaker Stellantis STLA 2.55%increase; green up pointing triangle have been moving swiftly to turn around the U.S. operations, employing a series of changes to jump-start sales again.

At the top of their list is reinvigorating well-known American brands, such as Chrysler and Dodge, whose sales and lineups have withered in recent years.

Stellantis’s brand leaders say they need to get back to basics by offering models at more affordable price points and promotions that can help increase sales. Such moves, they say, could reverse a dismal 2024 that concluded with Tavares’s exit in December.

Since the departure, the automaker has essentially shelved the former CEO’s playbook. Stellantis has delayed the release of two high-profile, electric-vehicle models and rehired some executives who had departed under Tavares, including bringing back a retired company veteran to lead the Ram brand.

Additionally, the company plans to launch new models in popular categories that it had pulled back under the previous leadership. Among them are a replacement for the Jeep Cherokee, a nameplate that accounted for about 17% of Jeep’s annual sales at one point before it was discontinued earlier this decade.

Overall, Stellantis sells seven auto brands in the U.S., including Maserati and Alfa Romeo.

“We need to be sure that in the next 12 months, we see a clear path to go to double-digit [market share],” said Antonio Filosa, who was named Stellantis’s chief operating officer of North America in October. Stellantis’s U.S. market share plummeted in the four years that Tavares led the combined company, dropping from 12.5% to roughly 8% last year.

Formed through a 2021 merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and France’s PSA Group, Stellantis started out strong by recording profits that vastly outpaced rivals, due in part to Tavares’s relentless focus on efficiency.

He also pledged to recharge the company’s weaker brands—Chrysler, Dodge and Fiat—using the global automaker’s engineering heft to quickly redesign models and freshen stale lineups.

While Tavares added some new models, he cut others and was adamant about keeping sticker prices high, despite complaints from dealers that it was hurting sales and leading to a pileup of unsold inventory.

By December, Tavares was out. The company cited “different views” that had emerged between the executive and key stakeholders. The former CEO declined to comment for this article.

December is generally a busy sales period for the industry, and Stellantis had only two of the top 20 models sold in the U.S., according to data from industry research firm Motor Intelligence. Jeep and Ram didn’t even crack the top 10 among brands.

A new CEO is expected to be named in the first half of this year. Meanwhile, Stellantis Chairman John Elkann, the scion of Italy’s famous Agnelli clan, has stepped in to lead an executive committee that will help him run the business. Following the departure of Tavares, Elkann went on a globe-trotting peacekeeping mission with Stellantis’s key stakeholders.

At the Detroit Auto Show earlier this month, brand executives were promoting the recent changes and trying to instill confidence that it has a plan to regain lost momentum.

“It’s no secret, the relationships that we have with our dealers, our suppliers, the general people who have been associated with us for the last few years, that needs a lot of love and attention,” said Bob Broderdorf, head of Jeep in North America.

Dealers say the return of a midsize Jeep to replace the Cherokee and a forthcoming gas-powered Dodge Charger has them feeling optimistic about 2025. The lack of an immediate replacement for those two models proved to be a significant challenge to its sales growth, especially for Dodge, which was left with only three models.

Following Tavares’s departure, Filosa reshuffled the executive ranks in North America and said the return of Tim Kuniskis, the former Dodge and Ram chief who retired just months earlier under Tavares, will play a big role in reversing the sales decline.

As head of the company’s highly profitable Ram brand, Kuniskis said his first move was to temporarily shelve plans to sell an all-electric pickup next year and instead introduce a truck that runs on battery power but has a backup gas engine.

“Why aren’t we leading with our best foot?” Kuniskis said at the Detroit Auto Show.

Ram sales fell 19% in 2024, compared with a year prior. Kuniskis said he is also focusing on increasing Ram’s leasing figures in 2025 to customers in regional markets where it isn’t offering competitive deals.

“We’re missing the boat there,” he said.

Bigger questions have loomed over the fate of Chrysler, the iconic American brand that once served as a powerhouse for the company’s U.S. business.

Chrysler currently only sells two models—both minivans. The company stopped making the Chrysler 300 sedan after the 2023 model year, further whittling down its lineup.

Brand Chief Executive Chris Feuell offered little when asked about Chrysler’s future. It plans to sell a refreshed Pacifica in 2026, followed by a new crossover vehicle and then a third model inspired by a futuristic coupe-like concept car that it released in early 2024. A planned EV has been temporarily shelved.

Feuell expects to double sales to about 300,000 a year with the new Pacifica and future models.

“I have no interest in being a niche player,” she said.

Meanwhile, dealers are expecting sales to regain momentum this year because the car company has been providing them with more firepower to offer customers financial sweeteners.

Ralph Mahalak, a Stellantis dealer in Michigan, said he is expecting to sell up to 37% more cars in 2025 compared with last year, prompting him to hire more workers.

During sales calls with staff, Mahalak said he has found himself rattling off a list of new promotions that had been eliminated in recent years.

“Shoot, this almost feels like the old days again,” Mahalak said.

The Trump administration is considering selling two-thirds of the federal government’s office stock

Shortly before he was elected president in 2016, Donald Trump took a break from campaigning to attend a ceremony for his new flagship hotel, the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C.

The General Services Administration, the federal agency that owns, manages and leases much of the government’s real estate, had previously awarded Trump the rights to redevelop the government-owned Old Post Office as a luxury hotel. The GSA selected him over Hilton, Marriott International and other big-name operators.

Just before cutting the ribbon on the hotel’s opening day, Trump took a moment to praise the agency.

“The GSA people are amazing professionals,” he said.

Since then, Trump has soured on the GSA. That change of heart could soon accelerate a shake-up already under way in the federal government’s real-estate portfolio.

The GSA manages a massive portfolio of federal buildings, consisting of 370 million square feet nationwide. But many have been poorly maintained due to lack of funding, and are sitting empty or underused, the GSA testified before Congress in 2023.

The Trump administration is considering selling two-thirds of the federal government’s office stock to the private sector, according to people familiar with the transition operations.

About three-quarters of the 70 million square feet of office space the GSA leases from private landlords in D.C. is also likely to be canceled, according to Don Peebles, a longtime Washington, D.C.-based developer. A sharp rise in GSA canceled leases would pressure D.C. landlords, many of which count on the GSA as an anchor tenant.

A GSA spokeswoman said: “GSA continues to work to right-size the federal portfolio, and is committed to optimizing space in federal buildings.” GSA could further accelerate these efforts with funding from Congress, she added.

The GSA has also been working to reduce the real estate it owns as more of its buildings deteriorate from a lack of maintenance. But it is hardly an easy task. Before auctioning off any properties, the GSA must typically make them available free or at a reduced cost to government entities. Ultimately the agency doesn’t keep the profits of the sales.

Much of what it can sell, Peebles said, will likely be at fire-sale prices. That could drag down the worth of other D.C. office buildings, which have already plunged in value in recent years.

“Buildings will sell for 30 cents on the dollar,” Peebles said. “It’s a paradigm shift. There will be a dramatic reset on property values.”

Trump and the GSA have a long, intertwined history.

Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to Post Cereals, owned the Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. She turned over the Palm Beach property to the federal government upon her death in 1973. But the GSA found it too expensive to maintain, returning it to the Post Foundation in 1981. Trump acquired it about four years later and it has become a resort and his primary residence in recent years.

Trump crossed paths with the GSA again in 2012, after the agency picked his family company to manage the Old Post Office as a luxury hotel, the jewel in the Trumps’ lodging portfolio. And if the Trumps decide to make a play for it again after selling the lease in 2022, the GSA will have to approve that purchase.

But the relationship began to deteriorate a few years later, after Trump clashed with the GSA over emails it turned over as part of the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

And following his 2024 election victory, Trump has mostly kept his distance. He shunned the GSA’s offer to provide temporary office space in Washington, D.C., and other resources during the transition. That makes him the first president-elect who didn’t accept resources as part of the transition since they were offered starting in 1963.

The GSA was founded in 1949 by President Harry S. Truman. Long before Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency—where Elon Musk has vowed that DOGE will slash up to $2 trillion from federal spending—the GSA was the original vehicle for cutting government waste. It consolidated many different agencies after World War II, with a mandate to save taxpayers money.

Over the years, its role evolved into serving primarily as the government’s landlord. It also functions as federal agencies’ one-stop shop for goods and services, including computers, vehicles and catering services.

Lawmakers tried to help the GSA recently, when Congress loosened some selling restrictions for a select group of federal buildings, allowing the agency to market or auction many buildings at once.

But that still won’t make unloading many of these properties easy. Some massive government buildings are empty or uninhabitable, said one former GSA official. Many others were built in the 1970s and have lacked the proper maintenance for decades.

Take the former GSA regional headquarters in L’Enfant Plaza. The nearly 1 million-square-foot office building is the largest property the GSA is looking to shed. It is in a prime Washington, D.C., location. But it has stood empty since 2018, due to its need for extensive renovations that would cost about $184.8 million, per a report put together by the GSA in September of 2021.

“It’s a tough time to own an aging office building,” said Darrell Crate, chief executive of Easterly Government Properties, which owns and manages real estate that it leases back to the federal government. “There is a thicket of bureaucracy that needs to be thinned.”

Many federal office buildings are run with bare-bones services and have been nearly empty since the pandemic accelerated the trend of working from home.

A recent report from Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa who chairs the Senate DOGE caucus, found that not one of the headquarters for any major agency or department in Washington is more than half full. GSA-owned buildings in Washington, D.C., average about a 12% occupancy rate. The government owns more than 7,500 vacant buildings across the country, and more than 2,200 that are partially empty.

“The government is not very good at managing real estate,” Crate said.

Mar-a-Lago is a prime example of a property that the government couldn’t manage well, but that Trump was able to turn around for profit as a resort and private club.

“GSA couldn’t handle it,” said Crate. “But Trump picked it up and turned it around.”

Ørsted blames interest rates, supply chains and ‘market uncertainties’ for latest writedown of US business

The world’s largest offshore wind developer has announced fresh writedowns on its US business, sending its shares down sharply as the inauguration of Donald Trump as president clouds the outlook for the renewables sector.  

Ørsted announced impairments totalling DKr12.1bn ($1.7bn) on Monday evening, blaming interest rates, supply chain challenges and “market uncertainties” affecting the value of its seabed leases. 

Ørsted’s Copenhagen-listed shares fell more than 17 per cent as the market opened on Tuesday morning, adding to their decline over the past year.

Monday evening’s announcement was a blow to the Danish group’s efforts to move on from DKr28.4bn of impairments to its US portfolio in 2023. It had also blamed that writedown on rising interest rates and supply chain challenges. 

The fresh writedowns were revealed hours after Trump’s inauguration and his immediate suspension of new offshore wind leasing.

“We’re not going to do the wind thing. Big, ugly wind mills. They ruin your neighbourhood,” he said, according to a Reuters report.

Ørsted’s two offshore US projects in construction, Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind, already have the required federal permits.

But Trump’s approach is weighing heavily on the sector. Shares in Vestas, a Danish-listed wind turbine maker, fell more than 4 per cent on Tuesday morning.

In a call with analysts on Tuesday morning, Mads Nipper, Ørsted’s chief executive, said the company was reviewing Trump’s suspension order, but declined to comment further.

On Monday Trump signed an executive order initiating the US’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, signed in 2016 as part of a global effort to curb climate change. 

Announcing the impairments on Monday, Nipper said they were “very disappointing”, but the company remained “committed to the US market for the long term”. 

He added: “We continue to navigate the complexities and uncertainties we face in a nascent offshore industry in the new US market.”

Ørsted entered the US in 2018 as a pioneer in its offshore wind industry, but struggled, along with many of its peers, when interest rates rose and supply chains came under strain following the Covid-19 pandemic. 

In November 2023, it said it was abandoning two projects off the coast of New Jersey, spooking shareholders with the DKr28.4bn writedown, which was higher than expected.

In an attempt to turn the business around, the company said last February that it was suspending its dividend, cutting up to 800 jobs, and withdrawing from offshore wind markets in Norway, Spain and Portugal in an attempt to focus on core areas.

In Monday’s announcement, Ørsted said increases in US long-dated interest rates had pushed up its cost of capital, accounting for DKr4.3bn of the DKr12.1bn total impairments. 

It booked another DKr3.5bn because of the “market uncertainties” affecting the value of several seabed leases, while the final DKr4.3bn covered delays to its Sunrise Wind offshore wind project off the coast of New York. This project is now due to be up and running in the second half of 2027.

However, Ørsted said it would stick to its full-year operating profit guidance of DKr24.8bn for 2024. Its wind farms, both on land and at sea, had performed in line with expectations, it said. Revenues in 2023 totalled DKr79.3bn.

Before Tuesday’s fall, Ørsted’s shares had dropped almost 20 per cent over the past 12 months, and are roughly 77 per cent below their peak in January 2021 at the height of interest in environmental stocks.

US president has said he wants waterway back over alleged Chinese influence

Panama’s government on Monday began an audit of a Hong Kong company that operates ports at either end of its canal, after US President Donald Trump warned he wanted to take back the waterway over alleged Chinese influence.

In his inauguration speech on Monday, Trump repeated criticisms he made in recent weeks about the Panama Canal, which handles about 3 per cent of global seaborne trade each year.

In response, Panama’s Office of the Comptroller General published a video on social media platform X of about 10 men and women in suits filing off a bus into the local offices of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Ports to begin an audit, in a move seen as a nod to Trump.

“Today our auditors arrived at [the company] to start an exhaustive audit aimed at guaranteeing efficient and transparent use of public resources,” the comptroller general’s office said on X.

Hutchison Ports, the ports arm of Hong Kong-listed conglomerate CK Hutchison Holdings, operates 53 ports in 24 countries including in the UK, Germany and Hong Kong.

It first won the concessions to operate two ports, one at each end of the canal, in 1997, the year that Hong Kong was returned to Chinese rule by the UK. The concessions were renewed in 2021.

Controlled by the family of Li Ka-shing — one of the richest in Asia — CK Hutchison Holdings also operates a vast global infrastructure portfolio including Northumbrian Water in the UK and the Australian Gas Networks.

China does not control the canal, but some officials in Washington are increasingly concerned about Chinese companies’ presence in the area. Hong Kong’s government has become more closely aligned with China since a crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2019 and the introduction of tough national security legislation.

CK Hutchison did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Panama’s audit.

The US oversaw the building of the canal, which opened in 1914, but handed full control back to the Central American country in 1999. Trump has called the move a “mistake” and has decried the high fees.

Fees to cross the canal, which uses fresh water to operate its locks, have risen significantly since a major drought in 2023 led to restrictions and later changes in how slots are assigned.

“We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should never have been made,” Trump said. “We didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama and we’re taking it back.”

Panama has long been one of the closest US allies in Central America and has been trying to halt US-bound migration through its notorious Darién Gap. The country cut ties with Taiwan to recognise China during Trump’s first term in 2017.

Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino — a law and order conservative — on Monday published a strongly worded statement “wholly rejecting” Trump’s words and saying the canal would remain Panamanian.

He added that no nation was interfering with the canal’s administration and that dialogue was the best way to resolve the issues Trump raised. He also disagreed with Trump’s characterisation of the US returning the canal to Panama.

“The canal wasn’t given by anyone, it was the result of a generational fight that culminated in 1999,” he wrote on X.

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Venture capital firms have increasingly been acting like private equity firms by investing in or buying mature businesses in need of a turnaround. Now those firms are utilizing another PE strategy—rolling up multiple competitors into a single company that can operate more efficiently by combining costs.

Venture capital firms such as General Catalyst and 8VC are creating or investing in these types of holding companies in fields such as call center support, accounting and property management. In contrast to PE-style roll-ups, the VC firms are starting companies or backing them before their businesses have proven themselves. To keep costs down, they’re incorporating artificial intelligence software to take over work such as responding to tech support requests.

The Takeaway

Venture firms like General Catalyst and 8VC are investing in services-oriented startups in the hopes of combining them with other firms, a roll-up strategy borrowed from private equity that incorporates AI.

For example, General Catalyst, known for venture investments in Canva and Stripe, helped start Long Lake Management and invested in the firm, which was co-founded by early Ramp director Zach Frankel. Long Lake aims to acquire numerous homeowners’ associations—the companies that govern and manage housing communities—and to use AI to automate operations and run them more efficiently, according to people with direct knowledge of the company. There are hundreds of thousands of HOAs across the country, according to the Foundation for Community Association Research.

8VC, known for early bets on Flexport and Anduril, in July led a $50 million round in Loop, which handles payments and financial audits for logistics businesses, Loop co-founder Matt McKinney said.

Loop is building its own AI agents by fine-tuning models and analyzing data to help payment providers manage transportation and budgets and offer automated customer support. The company has acquired a freight payment provider and is in the process of purchasing another. McKinney, who declined to name the target, estimates there are about 250 freight payment providers in the U.S., serving a market of about $15 billion.

Several years ago, McKinney said, “I would have been laughed out of the room if I pitched VCs on the strategy” to buy old payment providers. Since then, he added, the strategy has become “the hottest thing in Silicon Valley.”

That might be an overstatement, but there are signs of the trend in many corners of the industry. Last spring, Thrive Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners invested in a Tampa, Fla.–based accounting firm, Crete Professionals Alliance. Crete has said it will invest in other accounting businesses and then use its technology to help run those firms.

WndrCo, a venture firm and holding company co-founded by Hollywood studio veteran Jeffrey Katzenberg, in 2023 invested in 22-year-old call center GlowTouch. Last year, WndrCo’s investment helped the Louisville, Ky.–based firm buy a 3,000-person, 20-year-old call center.

GlowTouch, now rebranded to UnifyCX, is in the process of acquiring another call center and plans to buy others to combine them, according to CEO and founder Vidya Ravichandran. After buying the companies, it then incorporates AI to screen résumés for recruiting, automate support tickets and speed up employee training and quality assurance checks, said Ravichandran.

“Ninety-nine percent of the companies out there in space have really not even thought about [AI],” she said.

And last year, Accel partner Peter Doyle left the storied VC firm after nine years to start Treeline, a startup focused on automating IT services. Treeline plans to acquire other IT businesses. The startup has been in fundraising talks with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, according to people close to the business.

The strategy is a shift from traditional venture bets in more ways than one. Venture investors have typically backed high-margin software or consumer internet businesses they hope will go public someday. In pursuing services firms, they are writing checks for lower-margin businesses that are unlikely to yield the same high investment returns from going public as software companies. But returns are more guaranteed.

“You have to buy the accounting firm,” which can be more expensive than giving a founder a seed investment check of $1 million or $2 million, said ChenLi Wang, a general partner at WndrCo. “But if it doesn’t work, at the end of the day you still have an accounting firm,” whereas software businesses that don’t achieve a high enough scale usually have to shut down entirely.

ChenLi said his firm’s roll-up investment strategy was inspired by Berkshire Hathaway and Constellation Software, which operate portfolios of businesses they’ve bought.

Some founders of services firms are skeptical about whether this strategy will work. Will Champagne, the founder of a recruiting firm, said a venture capitalist approached him a few months ago, expressing an interest in buying his practice. He turned the offer down because he felt the investor did not understand the intricacies of the business, which rely on personal relationships and “human nuance,” he said.

“We respect our candidates far too much to let AI handle tasks like screening calls or deciding whether someone should move forward in the process,” he said.

Venture investors are convinced they can overcome these challenges, in part by hiring staff and raising funds to focus on buyouts. General Catalyst raised a $1.5 billion fund in October to establish and incubate startups, which includes funding buyouts of young services businesses. The firm has completed or is working on a dozen roll-ups in legal, accounting, software bug testing and other services fields, according to a person close to the firm.

One is Crescendo, a call center company it created in January 2024. In October, it invested in the call center company at a $500 million valuation. That same month, Crescendo said it acquired PartnerHero, a customer service company.

Ultimately, General Catalyst aims to take 30% to 45% stakes in startups that could act like holding companies for specific sectors—higher than the 10% to 20% stakes venture investors usually get from startup investments, but still minority ownership, said the same person.

8VC has invested in roughly a dozen AI services startups evaluating buying legacy services businesses as a main way they’ll grow, said Drew Oetting, a founding partner at the firm. Such acquisitions should help enterprise software companies stand apart because they’ll immediately be able to sell their software to more customers.

One risk in the strategy is that acquiring a business that ends up floundering is more expensive than trying to grow through marketing or sales, he said.

“Mistakes become very expensive, much more expensive than [venture capitalists] are used to,” he said.