20 years of tie-ups and break-ups among EU carmakers

PARIS:

Europe’s auto sector has witnessed two decades of takeovers, alliances and breakups, the latest being PSA’s purchase of Opel for 1.3 billion euros ($1.4 billion).

France’s PSA, which owns the Peugeot, Citroen and DS brands, said Monday that it would buy General Motors’ European subsidiary, which includes Opel and Vauxhall, to create the second-biggest European automaker, behind Volkswagen. Here is a look at other major deals, some of which floundered, beginning in the 1990s.

DaimlerChrysler, a flop

In 1998 the German group Daimler-Benz struck a deal to fuse the troubled US automaker Chrysler with its prestigious Mercedes brand. It was presented as a merger of equals, but Daimler invested 36 billion euros in the affair, and ran the show from the start.

By 2005, the combination had soured; Daimler boss Juergen Schrempp stepped down and his successor, Dieter Zetsche, announced in February 2007 that Daimler would sell most of its shares in Chrysler. It did so three months later, ceding 80.1 percent to the US investment firm Cerberus Capital Management for 5.5 billion euros.

Renault-Nissan, an enduring alliance

In 1999, French carmaker Renault acquired a 36.8 percent stake in Nissan, a Japanese group that was close to bankruptcy, and the Romanian brand Dacia. Renault boss Carlos Ghosn succeeded in pulling the three companies together and became head of all of them in 2005. Dacia blossomed from a derided east European carmaker to a respected low-cost brand that contributes regularly to the parent company’s bottom line.

A cross-shareholding deal has put 43 percent of Nissan’s shares in Renault’s hands, while the Japanese group owns 15 percent of Renault. In October 2016, Nissan took a controlling stake in Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors, bringing total production for the Renault-Nissan group to nearly 10 million vehicles a year.

Volvo: First to Ford, then Geely

In 1999, when Ford was the most profitable US automaker, it bought Sweden’s storied Volvo brand for $6.45 billion (about 4.64 billion euros at the time). A few year later, however, a combination of Japanese competition and rising oil and steel prices convinced Ford that it was time to look for a new buyer. In December 2009, it said it would sell Volvo to the Chinese group Geely for $1.8 billion.

Fiat: If at first you don’t succeed

In the late 1990s the ailing Italian group Fiat, which is controlled by the Agnelli family, went looking for a partner. In 2000 it agreed to hand over 20 percent of its shares to US giant General Motors in exchange for six percent of GM’s stock, then worth about $2.4 billion.

But Fiat’s situation did not improve, and in February 2005, GM bailed out of the deal, paying $2.0 billion (1.55 billion euros) to cancel a so-called put option that would have required it to buy the rest of Fiat’s equity. In mid-2009 a fitter Fiat struck a deal approved by US president Barack Obama to rescue Chrysler by start purchasing shares in the US group.

Fiat completed its takeover of Chrysler in January 2014, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) now sells about five million vehicles a year. In 2016, FCA’s net profit leapt to 1.8 billion euros from 93 million euros in 2015. —AFP