Fiat is considering moving corporate headquarters to the US following a planned merger with Chrysler Group, a news report said on Wednesday.
Three people “familiar with the matter” told Bloomberg News CEO Sergio Marchionne is evaluating the switch from Turin, where Fiat was founded in 1899, to the US as the carmaker’s revenue and profit center shifts to North America. Fiat generated 75% of 2012 operating profit in North America.
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No final decision on the headquarters has been taken and other options are being examined, the sources said. Fiat declined to comment but Bloomberg noted Marchionne said last month he favoured a primary listing in New York for the merged company.
Moving Fiat’s headquarters away from Turin’s iconic Lingotto, a former car plant with an oval track on its roof, could create a political backlash in debt-ridden Italy, where the entire industrial sector is in decline. The unemployment rate is near a 20-year high as companies refrain from hiring amid the country’s longest recession in more than two decades, Bloomberg noted.
Europe in 2012 accounted for 24% of the group’s EUR84bn in revenue compared with 2004, when Marchionne became CEO, when Fiat relied on Europe for over 90% of its EUR27bn in sales.
The sources told the news agency Fiat would keep its European headquarters in Turin at the Lingotto building, which opened in the 1920s after founder Giovanni Agnelli visited Ford’s Detroit-area plants. Car production at the complex ended in the 1980s.
Bloomberg said Fiat needed to buy the remaining 41.5% Chrysler stake owned by the United Auto Workers’ retiree health care fund before the locations for the listing and headquarters can be finalised. The two sides are disputing in court the price for a portion of the shares Fiat is seeking to buy by exercising options.
