"Product is king": Stellantis pivots back to volume in bold growth plan

“Product is king.” That line from Stellantis’s head of American brands, Tim Kuniskis, nicely summed up the company’s investor day, in which the multinational giant attempted to wash itself clean of the failures of previous CEO Carlos Tavares and present a plan that walked the tightrope of promising growth in a no-growth environment. The 21 May event was a very different affair than that of 2022, when Tavares first presented his vision for the newly formed 14-brand company, starting with the change in location from Amsterdam to Michigan. Tavares had promised a wholesale shift to electric power, a raft of new income streams, from software to subscriptions, and a doubling of annual revenue to €300 billion (£260bn) by 2030. Stellantis under new CEO Antonio Filosa, like all automotive companies suffering from the hangover of wild, Tesla-fuelled digital promises, has to embrace the new realities and instead focus on product and cost-cutting. Revenues will still rise by 2030, promised Filosa, but only to €190bn, up from €154bn in 2025. “The reset has been profound and necessary,” said John Elkann, Stellantis chairman and scion of the Fiat dynasty, in his opening introduction to what he promised would be an “ambitious but realistic plan”. Investors at the event were told that overall vehicle sales are unlikely to grow in the company’s two main revenue-generating markets – Europe and the US – over the next four years. So growth within Stellantis will instead have to come from launches in market sectors that the company had backed away from under Tavares or in which its brands had never been strong. Under the plan, dubbed Fastlane 2030, Stellantis promised to launch more than 60 new vehicles globally between now and 2030, broadening its market coverage of Europe by 25% and North America by 50%. In the US, that means mostly dropping down into cheaper segments, such as smaller Ram pick-up trucks targeting the Ford Ranger and Maverick. In Europe, meanwhile, Stellantis will launch two new small electric cars in 2028, including the new Citroën 2CV and three new Fiat models atop the low-cost Smart Car platform. It will also push upward with more compact models, for example a new Vauxhall SUV created with Chinese partner firm Leapmotor. Volume had been a dirty word under Tavares, who was willing to lose market share rather than see initially high profit margins eroded. In Europe, for example, Stellantis’s share after the first four months of this year had fallen to 15.8% from 19.7% in 2022. After a disastrous 2025 in which Stellantis lost €22.3bn (£19.5bn), mainly due to write-downs on US EV investments left stranded by the US government's reversal of emissions targets, Stellantis is back in the volume business. Already we see the fruits of that in the UK, with news that Peugeot is cutting its prices up by up to £7000 across the range, reflecting the new world order in which new Chinese brands determine the price ceiling in the volume segments and woe betide those who don’t follow. What was clear from Stellantis's investor day was that Europe is the weak link in its empire. Of the €36bn allocated to Stellantis brands over the next four years, 60% is heading to the US, despite Europe leading in terms of sales, at 2.5 million in 2025 versus 1.3 million. “This reflects where we see the strongest combination of market opportunity, brand strength and attractive returns,” Filosa said. The US is now a walled garden, protected by tariffs and freed of any emissions constraints, allowing Stellantis to refocus on high-margin V8 pick0ups and muscle cars as well as cheaper segments. Starved of investment under Tavares, the American side of Stellantis is now front and centre of Filosa’s reboot ambitions, with a margin target of 8-10% by 2030. The European side meanwhile has a margin target of just 3-5%. The home of storied Stellantis brands such as Peugeot, Fiat, Vauxhall and Citroën may deliver proportionally far more sales, but it’s thin gruel compared to the US, with an average selling price of €22,600 in the first three months of this year, compared with €42,500 in the US, according to calculations made by the bank Bernstein. Consequently revenue is actually higher in the US. Stellantis is covering off Chinese competition in Europe with partnerships with Leapmotor and now Dongfeng, allowing it to tackle the threat from the likes of BYD, Chery and MG head-on while also refilling its depleted plants. Leapmotor will take over Stellantis's Madrid plant and have cars built at its Zaragoza plant in Spain, while Dongfeng will build high-end Voyah models at the company’s Rennes facility in France. That will improve Stellantis’s factory utilisation rate in Europe from a poor 60% now to a “best-in-class” 80%, European boss Emanuele Cappellano promised at the investor day. The other plant-filler will, of course, be more volume from these new models. Bernstein analyst Stephen Reitman wasn't completely sold on the idea that Stellantis could boost volume simply by playing in new segments. “It is axiomatic that a gap in one’s line-up does not mean there’s a hole in the market,” he wrote in a note entitled 'A Fast Lane to Where Exactly?', citing as an example strong Japanese competition in the US crossover market, where Stellantis wants to expand its single-model Chrysler brand. In Europe, the planned 25-plus model launches by 2030 will gather 25% more market coverage but generate only 15% more revenue, Stellantis said. Cappellano explained to journalists that the gap was because much of the volume will come from these new electric city cars with a target price of around €15,000 – below the company’s average selling price in Europe and therefore making a smaller dent on revenue. With Europe dragging down Stellantis's profitability, due in part to new market entrants, analysts took little comfort in the plans for the region’s reboot presented in Michigan. “We struggle to find any catalysts that revive the company’s performance in Europe,” Reitman said. Whereas Stellantis’s strategy in North America looks “straightforward”, according to Philippe Houchois of the bank Jefferies, “the Europe strategy [is] more demanding”. Investors will be watching the delicate balancing act required to localise Chinese tech and models through Leapmotor and Dongfeng to satisfy EU regulations and remove tariffs with the need to preserve the cost advantages they have in China. Much of Stellantis’s profit targets will come via cost-saving – another recurrent theme among global car makers at the moment. That will be partly achieved through quality control, Filosa said, something he hopes adoption of AI will help improve. This is doable, believes Deutsche Bank analyst Christoph Laskawi, “but we remain somewhat more sceptical on growth". Stellantis under Filosa hasn't shed everything from Tavares’s Dare Forward plan from 2022. For example, it retains the belief that moving to software-defined vehicles using its STLA Brain software architecture from 2027 is the right path, opening up opportunities in autonomous driving with UK specialist Wayve and Qualcomm (replacing a deal to take software developed by BMW and Qualcomm). But as with Renault earlier this year, the thrust of the investor day by Stellantis was to show that it can be a better car company by producing cars that customers will love at a price they can afford, with enough left over for shareholders. The star of the show was Kuniskis, who delivered a back-to-basics message aimed essentially at the US dealers alienated by Tavares. “All of the digital marketing, digital retailing, new shopping models, they can't fix a bad product, they can only amplify a good one. That's our entire strategy,” he said. Europe, however, is a far more complex story that's likely to shift many times before 2030.

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"Product is king": Stellantis pivots back to volume in bold growth plan

Multinational giant's “straightforward” reboot in US contrasts with trickier path to success in struggling Europe

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"Product is king": Stellantis pivots back to volume in bold growth plan

Multinational giant's “straightforward” reboot in US contrasts with trickier path to success in struggling Europe

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