If today FCA's Premium strategy is based on the development in Italy of the high-end brands Maserati and Alfa Romeo, and no longer on Fiat-branded cars, whose European production is now mostly allocated to Poland, Serbia and Turkey, this was the situation about thirty years ago when the two companies, Alfa Romeo and Maserati, were acquired by Fiat almost at the same time.
At the time, interest in the two companies was not dictated by an industrial strategy (as the immediately following years demonstrated) but by the desire to prevent new players from entering the Italian automobile production system.
If it is known that Fiat took the field to take over Alfa Romeo only after Ford had expressed its willingness to buy it, the reasons that led it to join Maserati are less well known.
Here's how things went.
Alejandro De Tomaso, the Argentine entrepreneur, former pilot and former anti-Peronist revolutionary, builder of the legendary dream cars Mangusta and Pantera, took over Maserati in 1975, through the GEPI (at the time the public financial bandwagon for the rescue and restructuring of private companies) , from the bankruptcy of the previous Citroen management and in 1976 Innocenti, which merged with Maserati into a new company called "Nuova Maserati". Also in this case the operation took place through the GEPI and on the initiative of the Government due to the strong pressure from the trade unions and clashes with the workers caused by the disposal of the historic Innocenti factory in Lambrate by British Leyland, which had taken over it years earlier with the brand Leyland Innocenti.
In the 80s Maserati, while production of the Quattroporte continued in Modena, assembled two cars in the Lambrate plant that had a certain commercial success: the Maserati Biturbo with the engine produced in Modena, and the Mini Innocenti with a 3-cylinder engine from the Daihatsu.
However, the production volumes of both the Maserati and the Mini were such that they never managed to saturate the production capacity and personnel of the two plants.
However, De Tomaso's aspirations aimed at the Italian borders and also aimed at America.
In 1984, together with Lee Iacocca, the CEO of Chrysler, he launched a project for a Chrysler-Maserati plant to be built in the United States, a project which would dissolve four years later when Chrysler gave up the initiative.
The reason for the abandonment of Chrysler was almost certainly in the financial statements: against a turnover of around 200 billion lire in 1988, Maserati recorded an operating loss of around 37 billion.
De Tomaso, with the American option gone, had to run for cover, and here he made one of those typical moves of his life, not only as an entrepreneur, but also as a young revolutionary, a companion of Guevara, who fled Argentina to avoid prison ( and never returned, as he told me one evening at the restaurant of the hotel Canal Grande in Modena that he owned) or as a mechanic-driver of the racing team who conquered a girl who also competed on European circuits under the pseudonym Isabelle, in reality a young American heiress who later became his wife.
In the summer of 1989 De Tomaso circulated the rumor that the Japanese were interested in the Lambrate plant, but above all that Eng. Vittorio Ghidella had visited Maserati in Modena for its possible acquisition.
This move was enough to get Fiat moving. For the Turin company it would have been intolerable to find Ghidella as an automotive player in Italy right after the reasons for his resignation as CEO of Fiat Auto and his exit from the Group.
Ghidella, the manager who had restored the automotive sector after 1980 with the launch of successful cars such as the FiatUno and the Lancia Thema, had in fact reached an agreement in 1983 with Fiat which provided for the transfer of 40 per cent of the shares to the same of Ferrari after the death of Enzo Ferrari.
But when the relationship with the company broke off in the autumn of 1988, with the accusation of seeing a purely "autocentric" Fiat in the future, Ghidella was also invited to withdraw from his share in the share capital of Maranello, obviously behind a reasonable fee.
In this context, Fiat began negotiations with De Tomaso to take over the Nuova Maserati company, with the factories in Modena and Lambrate, which concluded in December 1989 with an agreement first of collaboration and then of acquisition with the establishment of a new company, the “Maserati spa”, with 49 percent of the share capital of Fiat and the remainder of De Tomaso.
The agreement, for a total cost for Fiat of 350 billion lire, also envisaged the total transfer of the shares of Maserati spa to Fiat itself only at the end of the restructuring of the company and the closure of the Lambrate plant whose management remained with by De Tomaso, officially and formally, since the Turin house in those years was already exposed to another Milanese hot front, that of Arese.
In January 1993 De Tomaso, after an exhausting union negotiation conducted personally, signed an agreement with the metalworkers' union to close the Lambrate plant with a plan to relocate approximately 1000 workers to work; a plan which was subsequently managed by a task force of the Municipality of Milan was completely implemented within 3-4 years also thanks to the introduction for the first time in the legal system of layoffs by way of derogation, the so-called "Maserati cash".
Unfortunately, the day following the signing of the trade union agreement, De Tomaso suffered a stroke which prevented him from continuing to work in the company. Thus the transfer of the remaining 51 percent of Maserati's capital to Fiat was accelerated, which assumed full management of the company the following May.
In the following years the production of the Modena plant will move within a range between 4.000 and 6.000 cars per year; the turning point will come with Marchionne's choice to strengthen the FCA Premium brand by progressively allocating the production of the new Maseratis to the Turin hub of the Mirafiori and Grugliasco plants from 2012 with a target of an annual production of 50.000 cars.
But this is history of the present.
