By Matthew Curtin
Sergio Marchionne, the outspoken chief executive of Italian auto
maker Fiat Spa (F.MI) and its U.S. unit Chrysler LLC, will serve
another one-year term as the president of the European auto
manufacturers' association despite a rocky previous 12 months in
the role as the region's auto-making crisis worsens.
ACEA, as the association is known, said Friday its board of
directors had re-elected Mr. Marchionne, whose top priorities will
be pushing for a "meaningful and supportive European Union-wide
industrial policy" for the car industry while continuing to make
the case for "fair and balanced trade agreements."
In the past year, Mr. Marchionne's call for coordinated factory
closures as part of an EU response to tackle the chronic
over-capacity in the car industry with met resistance from Germany
whose auto makers are benefiting from strong product line-ups and
booming exports of premium cars. The disagreement led to a brief
spat between Mr. Marchionne and executives at Volkswagen AG
(VOW.XE), Europe's leading auto maker by sales.
In contrast to Volkswagen, Europe's other mass market auto
makers--including Fiat, French rival PSA Peugeot-Citroen (UG.FR)
and the European units of General Motors Co. (GM) and Ford Motors
Co. (F)--are in various stages of shuttering capacity to stem their
heavy losses in the region. Registrations of new cars in the EU
have fallen 7.3% in the first 10 months of the year.
As ACEA president, Mr. Marchionne has also been a vocal critic
of the EU's free-trade pact with South Korea, whose auto makers
have taken a small but fast-growing share of the EU car market. His
criticism of the pact gained some political support this year in
France, which called unsuccessfully for the deal to be revised by
Brussels.
The EU is in the early stages of preparing talks over a
free-trade agreement with Japan, a far bigger producer of
mass-market and premium cars.
"Independent studies have shown that this deal is a one-way
street as far as the automobile industry is concerned," said Ivan
Hodac, ACEA's secretary general said last week. "This has already
been our experience with the free trade agreement with South Korea
which entered into force last year."
ACEA cites research by Deloitte which estimates that an increase
in EU imports from Japan wouldn't be offset by an increase in
European exports to Japan. EU car exports could go up by a mere
7,800 units by 2020, compared with additional Japanese exports to
the EU amounting to 443,000 units.
Write to Matthew Curtin at matthew.curtin@dowjones.com
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