Struggling Italian carmaker Stellantis has ousted its CFO and confirmed its 66-year-old CEO will retire in two years in a major overhaul as the group tries to turn around a disastrous performance in the U.S.
The group confirmed its chief financial officer Natalie Knight would leave the company after just 18 months in the job. She has been replaced by Doug Ostermann, previously Stellantis’s COO for China.
Stellantis also announced new COOs in North America, Enlarged Europe, and China, in addition to a new CEO for Maserati and Alfa Romeo, Santo Ficli. As a result of the overhaul, ex-Enlarged Europe COO Uwe Hochgeschurtz will also depart the company alongside Global COO Knight.
The group also confirmed it had begun a formal process to find a successor to 66-year-old CEO Carlos Tavares, who it confirmed would be stepping down in 2026 when his contract expires.
“During this Darwinian period for the automotive industry, our duty and ethical responsibility is to adapt and prepare ourselves for the future, better and faster than our competitors to deliver clean, safe and affordable mobility,” Tavares said.
“The newly appointed leadership team members will make their valuable contributions to our overall team’s determination to tackle the challenges ahead, reinforcing and accelerating our transformation to become the preferred mobility tech company.”
Stellantis CEO to depart
Tavares was named Stellantis CEO in 2021 after a merger between Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA Group. Tavares was previously chairman of the management board at PSA.
Stellantis’s rejig represents a major overhaul designed to turn around the fortunes of the carmaker, which has hemorrhaged market share in the U.S. after hiking prices on its U.S.-focused Jeep, Ram, and Chrysler brands. The company’s stock has almost halved this year, with Stellantis issuing a profit warning in September that further spooked investors.
Ousted CFO Knight alarmed investors on an analyst call following that profit warning when she described its full-year margin targets as “ambitious.”
Under Portuguese CEO Tavares’s guidance, Stellantis focused on raising profits and cutting costs as key metrics and moved away from growing market share, to the dismay of its workers in Detroit.
Stellantis has struggled in the U.S. as a result, facing double-digit sales declines and forcing Tavares to admit his “arrogance” for failing to spot a collection of critical mistakes.
Bernstein accused Stellantis of having a “misplaced belief in its own pricing power” and argued the company had botched its premiumization strategy as customers voted with their feet and opted for mass-market vehicles instead of Stellantis’s as prices rose.
Speaking to Bernstein, U.S. Stellantis dealer Kenn Volz complained that he was struggling to shift the company’s cars, which he felt were overpriced and locked past customers out of a new purchase.
“Not everyone can afford a Wagoneer. How many people can afford a $100,000 SUV, outside of bankers and people in Manhattan?” said Volz.
“The teacher in Connecticut probably can’t afford that. So it’s like they’re limiting their addressable market.”
Volz concluded: “They’re all nice cars. They’re just all overpriced.”
Alongside struggles in the U.S., Stellantis is facing the same plight of its fellow European automakers, that of enhanced competition from cheap Chinese EVs.
Doubling down on his cost-cutting rhetoric, Tavares warned in May that Europe’s automotive industry was destined for a major shake-up that could threaten the 13.8 million jobs in the region.
“You are going to see a huge shift of the supplier base. The sourcing will move from the Western world to the best-cost countries,” Tavares said.
“The EV race has become a cost-cutting race.”
