Word: auto
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...still largely in charge. The Fiat Group, which counts CNH tractors and Iveco trucks among its holdings, has been buoyed recently by strong numbers from its once-suffering automobile division. Under the turnaround leadership of Marchionne, in the first five months of the year, European sales of the auto group (which includes the Fiat, Lancia and Alfa Romeo brands) jumped 23.2% over 2005 numbers, to around 520,000 units, representing nearly half of overall company revenues. And that's at a time when economic uncertainty has many Europeans putting off major purchases such as cars. With Fiat now rolling toward...
...Gangster, from Malaysian director Badi Hj. Azmi, is a standard exercise in macho auto-eroticism, but with extra horsepower. Malaysian punks race their souped-up cars on the public highways of the country?s capital - sort of The Fast and the Kuala Lumpurious. But it also interweaves three stories, making it a Crash with lots more fender-benders, and all in 79 zippy minutes. There?s also a scene in which a kidnapper rapes a sweet Muslim wife while her child?s in the room. No fatwas, please...
Chris Paine's documentary makes an unapologetic case for the car and an unofficial indictment of the forces allied against it: the auto and gasoline industries, an Administration stocked with former executives of oil companies and, not least, the American consumer, who would rather strut in a gas-gorging Hummer than put-put in a modest little...
...expertise. The country has a base of homegrown companies, like the Tata group, that are developing quickly, some of them with burgeoning international operations of their own. (See Tata story.) "Many Indian companies are dreaming of being world class," says Sanjiv Bajaj, executive director of Pune-based scootermaker Bajaj Auto. They're eliminating redundant staff, streamlining management and investing in modern production lines. A decade ago, Bajaj made one million two- and three-wheeled vehicles with 24,000 employees; today, it churns out 2.2 million with 10,000. "It is possible to deliver Japanese quality at Indian prices," says Pradeep...
...Initiatives like that are encouraging. "Add infrastructure and a flexible labor policy and boom! We'll have so much foreign exchange coming in we won't know what to do with it," says Rahul Bajaj, chairman of Bajaj Auto. But the country has made false starts on the road to modernization before. Is this time different? "I don't think this party can be spoiled," says Shirish Sankhe, a partner at McKinsey in Bombay. "No one wants to stay out of India...