As the chairman of both Stellantis and Ferrari, John Elkann is helming two car companies with contrasting trajectories. Ferrari's shares have climbed 6 per cent in the last 12 months, while Stellantis's have lost 52 per cent.Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
If there is one executive who represents the agony and the ecstasy of car company ownership, it is John Elkann.
Mr. Elkann, 49, is the heir of Italy’s Agnelli family dynasty and the chairman of both Stellantis STLA-N, the world’s fourth-biggest auto maker, and Ferrari RACE-N. The family holding company that he runs, Exor, is the biggest single shareholder in both companies. His grandfather, Gianni Agnelli, who died in 2003, was the Italian industrialist and playboy fashion dandy who controlled Fiat and turned it, briefly, into Europe’s biggest auto maker.
Two weeks ago at the Ferrari factory in northern Italy, Mr. Elkann made a rare public appearance. On stage, he was wearing white pants, blue sneakers and a blue Ferrari jersey, as if he were about to step onto a yacht. In fact, he was launching Ferrari’s latest project, Hypersail, a sailboat that will be 30 metres long, cost a fortune – the price was not disclosed – and no doubt burn up the long-distance ocean racing circuit in the same way Ferrari machines burn up the F1 circuits.
“We’re taking Ferrari from the land to the sea,” Mr. Elkann said.
For investors and hard-core F1 fans, Hypersail was a non-event. So far, only one boat is planned and its development costs will be paltry compared to the hundreds of millions Ferrari spends every year on research and development for its sports and F1 cars. But that’s not the point; the point is that Ferrari is at the top of its game and can afford to blow a few bucks on adventures in the name of brand extension – or just for the hell of it.
While everything about Ferrari makes Mr. Elkann beam with pride, the same cannot be said about Stellantis, whose brands include Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Citroen and Peugeot.
Stellantis, especially its once-glorious Italian brands and its once-steadfast U.S. fleet, are losing horrendous amounts of market share. In 2024, global revenues fell 17 per cent to €157-billion, net profits sank 70 per cent to €5.5-billion and auto deliveries were down 12 per cent. In the U.S., the company’s market share is a mere 8 per cent; not long ago, it was more than 12 per cent.
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Ferrari makes about 14,000 cars a year, Stellantis about six million. Ferrari shares have climbed 6 per cent in the last 12 months, giving the company a value of €80-billion. Stellantis shares have lost 52 per cent, for a value of €25.3-billion.
Here’s another way of looking at it. Each car that comes off the Ferrari line (excluding the F1s) is equivalent to €5.7-million of market value. For Stellantis, the figure is €4,200.
It’s hard to imagine that Mr. Elkann would sell Ferrari or merge it with another sports car maker. It’s entirely possible to imagine that he would unload Stellantis. But that scenario today seems highly unlikely, given that the company has lost almost two-thirds of his value since 2024. He and the new Stellantis CEO, Italy’s Antonio Filosa, who replaced the hapless Carlos Tavares of Portugal, will have to overhaul the company before they wade into the sellers’ market. But how?
Stellantis was formed in 2021 by the merger of Fiat Chrysler with France’s PSA Group. Fiat Chrysler had been put together by Sergio Marchionne, the Italian-Canadian CEO who saved both the Italian and American car makers from oblivion, and who was also CEO of Ferrari. He died in 2018, after which the Agnelli-Elkann family sought a merger partner for the mass-market auto maker. Stellantis was created and Mr. Tavares hit the ground running.
Huge profits were reported at first, but sales fell off a cliff in 2023 and 2024 as the company jacked up prices, repelling customers, while it was trying to cope with pandemic-induced supply shortages.
The new Citroen C5 Aircross production line at the Stellantis car maker plant in Chartres-de-Bretagne, near Rennes, western France. The company's brands include also Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge and PeugeotDAMIEN MEYER/AFP/Getty Images
Stellantis was its own worst enemy in other ways.
It arrived late to the electric-vehicle scene and its cars became bland. Alfa Romeo, for instance, became largely a maker of SUVs, betraying its lineage of sleek, light, sexy sports cars.
Excessive platform-sharing diluted brand values. The Alfa Romeo Tonale compact SUV, for instance, is based on a platform shared with Jeeps. Maserati was allowed to languish and now barely exists. Ditto Lancia and Abarth, Fiat’s maker of hot little cars. Chrysler, Dodge and Fiat itself pumped out a series of forgettable machines. Sales plummeted. Stellantis’s Mirafiori factory in Turin, which was Europe’s biggest car factory in the pre-Marchionne Fiat era, has almost no production.
The bigger problem is fighting the rise of Chinese EVs. China has built battery and EV plants in Hungary to infiltrate the EU market and avoid tariffs. Another problem is the EU plan to end the sale of internal-combustion-engine cars by 2035. No auto company, let alone Stellantis, is prepared for that deadline. Factories will inevitably close, handing greater market share to cheap Chinese EVs.
Ferrari will almost certainly survive and thrive (as a low-volume manufacturer, it hopes to be exempt from the 2035 deadline). But Stellantis, who knows? It has too many brands, too little respect for the qualities that had made some of the brands, like Alfa and Maserati, wonders on wheels, and a broken EV strategy. In Maranello last month, Mr. Elkann was happy to talk about Ferrari but declined to answer questions about Stellantis. No wonder.