Most of Fiat Chrysler’s growth will come from a recovering Europe as the US auto market reaches full capacity, Sergio Marchionne, the carmaker’s chief executive, said on Tuesday.
“After six or seven years of hell [in Europe] we are finally beginning to see the first steps of the purgatory. I think 2015 appears to be, from what I can tell, a relatively benign start of a recovery process,” he told a room of investors in New York.
The comments are the latest sign of a change in tone from Mr Marchionne, an Italian-Canadian, who has been one of the most bearish executives about Europe since before the eurozone crisis, often citing the continent’s low growth and poor productivity.
Fiat Chrysler in January reported a quarterly operating profit in Europe for the first time since the financial crisis and expressed confidence that it would stay in the black in Europe in 2015 — achieving full-year profitability in that part of the business 12 months ahead of schedule.
Mr Marchionne, who has become an outspoken supporter of Italy’s reformist prime minister Matteo Renzi, announced last month he was adding 1,500 jobs at one of Fiat’s Italian factories to produce the Jeep and Fiat 500X primarily for export. By contrast, Mr Marchionne, who last year completed a merger of Italy’s Fiat with Chrysler of the US, said on Monday that in the US he saw a market that was “fundamentally at capacity”.
“We’ve got an unemployment rate in the United States that at this level is structural. It’s not going to get lower than this,” he said. “I think that Nafta is done in the sense that we are going to enjoy a number of years where we are not going to see phenomenal growth in this block.”