Ferdinand Piech: Baron Von Bug
FERDINAND PIECH should be breaking out the champagne about now. Since taking the wheel at Volkswagen in 1993, when the German carmaker was hemorrhaging $1.1 billion a year, he has been obsessed with fixing the company his father once ran and turning it into a global powerhouse. This year, Volkswagen is expected to post a 60% gain in profits to $1.3 billion, on sales of $75 billion. Even more exciting for a man as competitive as Piech, Volkswagen is neck-and-neck with Toyota Motor Corp. and may very well replace it as the No. 3 auto maker in cars sold worldwide.
A passionate car guy who loves to tinker with engines, Piech, 61, has injected some pizzazz into the mass-market carmaker even as he has pursued a ruthless cost-cutting program. He slashed the number of basic platforms from 16 to 4, for example, and turned around his Seat and Skoda brands. Now he can concentrate on new products, such as the surprise hit family sedan of 1997, the Passat, and the Lupo minicar launched in Europe in 1998. But nothing beats the mastery of his introduction of the new Beetle, a project he personally championed in the face of in-house skeptics. The $16,425 high-tech version of the lovable bug has led a revival of Volkswagen's U.S. sales.
Piech's bold move into the ultra-luxury market--he bought Italian sports-car makers Lamborghini and Bugatti in 1998--spiced up VW, but it did lead to one high-profile blunder: In the race to buy Rolls-Royce Motor Cars for a pricey $640 million, Piech didn't do his homework and ended up losing the rights to the Rolls-Royce name to rival BMW. VW winds up with only the lesser-known Bentley brand after 2002. But don't expect that to stop the fiery engineer from striving to make VW into a class act.
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