Fiat names Agnelli heir John Elkann as chairman
The Agnelli family are back in the driving seat at Fiat following a six-year break after the carmaker today formally appointed John Elkann, grandson of the late Gianni Agnelli, as chairman.
Elkann, 34, has spent years being groomed by the Agnelli family's sprawling industrial dynasty to take charge of the carmaker, including business lessons on the ski slopes where he said his famous grandfather "pushed me to take the most difficult slope, and to discover places that we didn't know."
Now he has become the youngest-ever chairman of the Fiat group, which employs 80,000 people and owns a stable of marques including Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Maserati as well as trucks and agricultural machinery.
Elkan succeeds Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, who became chairman in 2004 and led Fiat's buy-out of bankrupt American marque Chrysler last year.
He also drove the hugely successful launch of the retro city runaround Fiat 500.
The presence of a five-metre cake decorated with miniature, chocolate versions of that car at Elkann's 2004 wedding showed how long he had been waiting to take the top job at Fiat.
As a student, Elkann spent summers working at various Fiat businesses, including time on car assembly lines.
He has since worked on other parts of the Agnellis' business interests, which include Italy's La Stampa newspaper and Juventas football club, where Elkann was involved in cleaning up a match-fixing scandal.
Today his new job started on happier terms, as Fiat posted a 352 million (£306.2 million) trading profit for the first quarter of the year.
Fiat said it expects trading profit for the year to come in at 1.1 billion-1.2 billion.
The carmaker said revenue in the first three months of this year rose 15% to 12.93 billion, thanks to strong sales in Europe and Brazil, but admitted the coming year would be tough.
Elkann's to do list will include working out how Fiat can build sales after the end of scrappage schemes across Europe.
The company today warned it would be "impacted" by the end of the cash for bangers deals that had "underpinned demand in Western Europe".
Fiat added that it was "positioning itself for a year of transition and stabilisation" in 2010.
