Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
Renault is too complex, COO says
One of the big challenges for French carmaker Renault, which ranks third in the world with Japanese partner Nissan and Russian ally AvtoVAZ, is that it is too complex, chief operating officer Patrick Pelata told the Reuters Automotive Summit.
“Renault is a complicated company,” he said and explained how many carmakers had embraced a matrix organisation to deal with their international expansion. “We’re definitely more complicated than Nissan,” he said.
He should know, he worked several years with Carlos Ghosn at Nissan and found met his wife in Tokyo.
Pelata, who was born at the feet of the Pyrenees mountains in Les Pujols in 1955 before studying at the prestigeous Polytechnique and Ponts et Chaussees schools in Paris, is in charge of diminishing this complexity and eking out costs.
