Fiat Chrysler is shaken without visionary CEO behind wheel
MILAN — Fiat Chrysler shares reflected investor concern about the exit of ailing CEO Sergio Marchionne, whose driven and creative management style has been the company’s fortune.
Shares in the ItalianAmerican carmaker closed down 1.5 percent after a 4 percent opening tumble in the first trading since Marchionne’s grave health condition was disclosed over the weekend.
Trading was volatile, particularly after news that the head of the company’s big European operations, who had been considered one of Marchionne’s potential successors, was quitting. Ferrari, where Marchionne was also replaced at the helm, closed down about 5 percent.
The Fiat Chrysler board on Saturday named longtime Marchionne Manley
Jeep executive Mike Manley as CEO, unexpectedly accelerating a transition that was planned for early next year. The company said the 66-year-old Marchionne suffered complications from shoulder surgery in Zurich, Switzerland, last month that worsened in recent days, and that he could not resume his duties. No other details were released.
Marchionne will be a hard act to follow. Analysts credit his industry vision and ability to strike deals and take risks for increasing the market value of Fiat tenfold since he took over in 2004. And while he was due to retire in 2019, most expected him to stay on in some role to guide the company.
“Some of us assumed he’d remain as chairman and be there to phone in his instructions,” said Max Warburton, an analyst at market research firm Bernstein who often publicly tussled with Marchionne on conference calls about the company’s earnings.
“Marchionne ran FCA in a command and control style, with constant firefighting measures. There is no operating manual to follow,” he said.
Marchionne engineered both the turnarounds of Italian carmaker Fiat and Chrysler, which Fiat acquired in 2009 in a deal with the U.S. government, creating the world’s seventh-largest carmaker out of two formerly dysfunctional entities. He created shareholder value for the Fiat-founding Agnelli family with successful spinoffs of Fiat’s heavy vehicle maker CNH Industrial and of the iconic Ferrari super sports car company. But his goal of another big merger failed to find any takers.
Marchionne proved himself a consummate dealmaker. He won control of Chrysler in a 2009 deal with President Barack Obama’s government without putting a penny down, only in exchange for bringing more small-car technology to Chrysler.
In May 2011, less than two years after leaving bankruptcy, Marchionne pulled off a huge refinancing of the company’s $7.5 billion loan from the U.S. government, retiring it with a combination of corporate bonds, loans and payments, even though Chrysler had not yet turned an annual profit. Some of the debt carried a 12 percent interest rate and cost the company $1.2 billion in interest per year. The maneuver helped the company to start making money again.