Fiat has received several firm offers for some of the 3 billion euros ($US2.6 billion) in assets it wants to sell to help reduce its debt, the Financial Times (FT) said, citing chief executive Paolo Cantarella.
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The planned assets sale is key to a restructuring plan announced last December, which is meant to halve Fiat’s net debt of six billion euros and to help turn round its automotive business, the FT said.
The newspaper said that Fiat yesterday reported an attributable net loss for 2001 of 445 million euros, its first since 1993, in line with its December forecast.
The Fiat Auto division swung to an operating loss of 549 million euros from a profit of 44 million euros, the FT said, though operating profit at agricultural and construction equipment unit CNH nearly quintupled to 209 million euros and truck division Iveco#;s profit almost halved to 271 million euros.
The FT said Cantarella would not predict 2002 results until an analysts meeting in May.
He added that Fiat had sped up the introduction of cheaper versions of its new compact Stilo by about six weeks to win a bigger share of Italy’s growing fleet market, the Financial Times said.
