PSA’s Carlos Tavares wasted little time getting his feet under the CEO’s table before announcing he was getting the pruning knife out to hack away at the fiendishly complicated global Citroen and Peugeot product lines, all in pursuit of a 2% operating margin by 2018 with a longer-term target of 5%.
The announcement was a bit short on the detail so we did the initial draft for him. And considered that achieving those goals will be a difficult and challenging job. Effectively, could he do for PSA what another Carlos – Ghosn – did for Nissan? We’ll watch with interest.
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A bit of new technology was flagged up by suppliers – when will they end this daft practice of not shouting about it till months after the vehicle model has been launched? Audi has some new LED light magic courtesy of Hella and Nissan, or should that be Nee-saan, is happily bolting Magna thermoplastic liftgate (that’s tailgate to us) modules into the redesigned Rogue which is more or less the NAFTA equivalent of the Qashqai. And tripling local purchases in Mexico where many of its NAFTA market cars are made.
The really big news about Nissan was the official opening this week of the new manufacturing plant in Resende, Brazil with capacity for 200,000 cars and engines a year. Like most new plants, it opened making stuff from which the bugs have already been worked out in other plants – Micra/March is made in Thailand and India – and that’s also the case with the coming Versa but, as Our Man in Brazil, prised out of the aforementioned Mr Ghosn, this is Nissan thinking 10 years ahead rather than into next week in the currently slight depressed Brazilian market.
After all, not every new automotive adventure in Brazil has been a stunning success in the last 20 years – just mention ‘Juiz de Fora’, ‘A-class’ and ‘100,000 a year’ in earshot of a long-serving Brazilian Mercedes exec. (The plant went on to build KD cars for various markets and is now happily building heavy trucks.)
Easter has belatedly rolled around so we’re off for a four-day weekend. Have a nice one.
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By GlobalDataGraeme Roberts, Deputy Editor, just-auto.com
