The Fleet Europe Forum presentations kicked off with a fascinating exchange of opinions between Gianluca Soma, CEO of ALD Automotive Group and Lorenzo Sistino, CEO of Fiat Automobiles cars.

Speaking of the crisis, Gianluca Soma started by saying that it had impacted every line of the P and L account, and that lessons had to be learned. Companies had to react immediately, think laterally. 
"In addition to this, the crisis revealed that sustainable funding has been a key market differentiator in our industry in 2009 and that vehicle remarketing became a pivotal process in lessor's operations, with a used car market suffering -12% price drop in Europe", added Gianluco Soma. "From now on, fleet mix will be better driven, ensuring a higher diversity in our fleets. This diversity will follow used car market demand in a pro-active way to reach higher used car sale performance", explained Soma.
Asked how Fiat had been able to record such good results, Lorenzo Sistino explained that as the brand had been in poor shape just a few years ago, it had already taken drastic corrective action before the crisis. “We learned that company culture is not just part of the game, it is the game. So we gave our managers more authority, but more performance responsibility to go with it. As a result, we are now closer to the competition than we had ever been before”. Moving on to the expected recovery, Gianluca Soma went on: “If they are to profit from reconstruction, leasing companies have to realise that this will happen at different speeds in different countries. So we have to invest in new countries, and above all invest in customers – it is they who pay our salaries, after all”. Adding to this, Lorenzo Sistino explained: “There is a lot of running going on, but the result is just that people stand still. So we have to run even faster than the others. The rules that applied in the past don’t apply now. The only rule is that there are no rules…”.

Turning to the future, the speakers believed that driver behaviour would become even more important in keeping TCO down, and that there was further room for telematics to influence this (as demonstrated by a Fiat presentation on this subject). To make progress here, Lorenzo Sistino and Gianluca Soma emphasised that leasing companies and car manufacturers would have to work closely together to provide new solutions.