Ex-Ferrari chairman Sergio Marchionne passes away

He famously asked customers not to buy his Fiat 500 EV “because every time you buy one it costs me $14,000”.

As CEO, Marchionne has led FCA through multiple plans for profitability, which the automaker has largely delivered on, and spun off Ferrari as a successful standalone business unit.

In his first comments to analysts since being named Marchionne’s successor on July 21, Manley choked back emotions, saying he had spent “the last nine years of my life” talking and interacting with Marchionne on a daily basis, and that the news of his passing was “heartbreaking”.

Mr Marchionne has been succeeded by Briton Mike Manley, head of the Italian-American firm’s Jeep division.

“What struck me about Sergio from the very beginning, when we met to talk about the possibility of him coming to work for the Group, even more than his management skills and unusual intelligence, were his human qualities, his generosity and the way he understood people”, said Elkann.

Elkann’s office declined to comment.

“He represented the best Italy: the hard-working and concrete, serious and prepared, gifted with a vision and able to look to the future”.

FCA said that it has fixed-price contracts for most raw steel through 2018, but would see increases in 2019 if current prices hold. He went on to say that the company’s board would not engage in a “rubber stamp process”.

Italy’s biggest and most leftwing union CGIL said, however, that Marchionne maye have saved Fiat but did not save not union dialogue.

Sergio Marchionne, the man in black and self-proclaimed fixer who plucked Chrysler from the ashes of bankruptcy in 2009 and hitched it to Fiat to create a money-making global automaker, has died, according to a statement from Fiat Chrysler Chairman John Elkann.

The move that made Marchionne’s name as a dealmaker was getting General Motors to pay $2 billion in 2005 to sever ties with Fiat.

“For Altavilla it was too important – he wants to be CEO at least once in his career”, one of the sources said. Italian media outlets have reported that the surgery was to begin removing an aggressive, invasive type of cancer, but the resulting complications are unconfirmed at the time of writing. The company has not provided details on Marchionne’s illness.

Marchionne joined Fiat in 2004, and leaves behind an impressive legacy at the company.

His death was confirmed Wednesday by Exor NV, the holding company of Fiat’s founding Agnelli family, just days after Marchionne was replaced as CEO. That ultimate deal eluded him.

Tripling profits in just three years, he subsequently turned around the fortunes of SGS SA, a Swiss product-testing company controlled by the Agnelli family.

Born on June 17, 1952, Marchionne spent his youth in Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “He was a giant in the industry, a friend of the Italian-Canadian community, and a visionary in the corporate world”. His health reportedly rapidly deteriorated following the surgery, leading to Marchionne’s departure from Fiat Chrysler over the weekend.

Manley runs the two brands, Jeep and Ram, that generate most of the group’s profit.