Word: lutz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...country where businessmen dress discreetly, speak circumspectly and plod patiently up the executive ladder, Robert A. Lutz, the president of German Ford, cuts a rather exotic figure. He wears elegant London-made suits and colorful shirts, rides motorcycles, collects and personally restores old cars, and speaks provocatively enough to have rated a full-length interview in the May German edition of Playboy (sample quote: "There is nothing rational about the automobile industry. There is no other aspect of business that depends so much on psychology, prejudice and image"). Now the 44-year-old Lutz is moving into...
That is exactly the kind of challenge that Lutz met and mastered when in 1974 German Ford lured him away from Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW), where he had been sales vice president. It scarcely seemed a good time to make the move, since German Ford in 1974 lost $69 million-while its chief rival, General Motors' Adam Opel subsidiary, squeezed out a $2.4 million profit-and saw its share of the nation's auto market fall to 10%, from...
...Says Lutz: "Those views were always wrong, but to alter them we had to make some minor design changes and a major effort to improve our reputation." The worst problem was with the top-of-the-line Granada: sales fell from 110,677 in 1972 to 40,786 in 1974. At Lutz's insistence, the ride was hardened (Europeans like "the feel of the road"), the power steering was made less sensitive and minor external styling changes eliminated the American look...
...after two years of flagging sales and profits, is racing out of the valley of despair like a supercharged Porsche showing its paces in an Alpine rally. Output rose 47% in January from a year earlier, and many executives view 1976 with something akin to euphoria. Predicts Robert A. Lutz, head of German Ford: "It will be a fantastic year...
...subsidiary, thanks to nimble financial management, was able to stay in the black with a profit of $2.4 million on sales of $1.8 billion. "The big producers were all stuck with high breakeven points [largely because of high labor costs and excess plant capacity] when the recession struck," says Lutz, who moved to Ford from Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) in 1974. "Now the arithmetic is coming right...