What was said (and what wasn’t said) at the automotive table
How is the Italian automotive industry doing, what is the government doing and what is the role of Stellantis. The speech by Ferdinando Uliano, general secretary of the Fim-Cisl
The ministerial table on the automotive sector was held yesterday in Rome at MIMIT with all the players in the sector's supply chain. At the beginning, Minister Urso underlined how the automotive industry is strategic for our country and took stock of the results of the eco-bonus.
URSO'S WORDS ON THE ITALIAN AUTOMOTIVE SITUATION
According to the minister, the "Ecobonus Plan 2024" satisfied four of the five objectives he had set himself, namely: ecological transition, scrapping, support for people and medium-low incomes, while the fifth objective, underlined the minister, which we proposed with the Plan , together with the producers and the supply chain, that is, to increase the production of cars produced in Italy, has not been achieved, indeed there has been an increase in the Redundancy Fund.
Precisely for these reasons, the minister intends to reshape the car incentive plan. The automotive fund has 750 million for 2025, 1 billion for 2026 and 1 billion for the following years up to 2030. The idea, said Urso, is to create a three-year programming of the Plan, also on the basis of the policies European governments on the sector, evaluating further facilitative instruments that will come from the EU. The priority must be to support the sector's component supply chain, facilitating the European one. The Minister then spoke about the need for the establishment of another car manufacturer, confirming the dialogue with various Chinese production companies starting from Dongfeng. He also recalled the signing by Prime Minister Meloni, during her recent visit to China, of a memorandum with the Chinese Minister of Industry which envisages industrial collaboration on hybrid technology and electric mobility and to date three car manufacturers are interested. In the second part of August – he then said – a technical mission from MIMIT will return to China to have further discussions with other Chinese production companies.
The Minister then specified that he had sent a document to the Stellantis Group regarding the slowdown in investment in Termoli and the situation of the Italian production sites. Stellantis has made itself available to reopen the dialogue after the summer break to update the industrial plan also in light of the new European scenarios and policies on the sector.
Stellantis intervened confirming the Plan and the centrality of Italy in the Group's global strategies, together with the objective of bringing production to 1 million vehicles by 2030.
FERDINANDO ULIANO'S COMMENT
A meeting like today's would have been useful if today we had before us the signing of a protocol for the sector, unfortunately after a year this is not the case. I think that the situation we face in the sector is complex and must be approached in a systematic manner, otherwise failure will result. We need industrial policies that look at all the players in the sector, using the approach that we have put in place with the working tables on the sector from December 2023 to March of this year. Roundtables that produced indications for wide-ranging industrial policy actions for the sector, starting from two fundamental themes: localization of production, the reduction of the cost of energy and that of social safety nets. On the latter, in 2025 both the related industries and Stellantis will run out of social safety nets, if action is not taken in time there will be mass layoffs.
For this reason, that working method and the work already done must be resumed and the necessary industrial policy tools must be put in place, starting from the preparation of significant interventions on the strengthening of the offer and the industrial reconversion of the sector greatly affected by the transition, up to today the incentives only went towards purchasing demand.
With respect to this approach, there is another piece of reasoning that must be done with the Stellantis Group to understand if the production decline (we went from 750 thousand vehicles in 2023 to 500 thousand vehicles in 2024 with incentives) is due to a cyclical decline of the market or something structural on which we need to act as quickly as possible.
It is therefore essential to confirm the assignments of new models that we have acquired in the discussions we had with Stellantis, but also the possibility of identifying further investments which must be consistent with the production objective of 1 million by 2030.
Our goal is to secure all the plants and the over 40,000 employees of the Stellantis group and related industries. It is also necessary to have certainties regarding the investment of the giga-factory in Termoli and guarantees for the industrial and employment protection of Comau .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/tavolo-automotive-commento-uliano/ on Thu, 08 Aug 2024 05:58:52 +0000.