Fiat Auto plans to invest US$1 billion in South America as it seeks to gain a 15 percent slice of the regional action, an ambitious plan that envisions the carmaker making a direct assault on the lucrative Mexican market, reports the Financial Times. The newspaper quotes Cledorvino Belini, the CEO of Fiat Automòveis, the autonomous Brazilian arm of Fiat Auto, and the biggest hub of manufacturing operations for the carmaker outside its home base of Italy, as saying that raising their Latin American share to 15 percent (from the current 12 percent) is "realistic". FT says that the majority of the investment will be made in the area of getting new automotive designs to the market and improving the production processes at its giant Betin factory at Belo Horizonte.

Fiat Auto will report its third quarter financial results tomorrow, and the South American region is now to be a focus of their attention. Taking a 15 percent slice of the market would see Fiat overtaking Ford to become the third biggest regional automotive business, behind the market leader, American giant General Motors, and the second-placed VW Group. To achieve this Fiat will need mirror the success it has achieved in Brazil where it is having a bumper sales year, and leading the market with 25 pct of all sales. By the end of last month it had sold 326,928 vehicles, more than thirty five thousand The Fiat Palio hatchback last month topped its segment while the Strada pick-up is the light commercial leader. “I’d like to see us eventually gain a 25 per cent market share across the whole of Latin America but, in the next few years, would settle for a lower figure,” Belini told the Financial Times.

One of the key strategies for Fiat to follow in the latter half of this decade will be to make an impact on the new car market in Mexico where it is currently very underrepresented. “About 1.1m new cars a year are sold in Mexico – which means it is Latin America’s second largest car market – but at the moment Fiat is barely present in this country,” said Mr Belini.
 

FT also report Belini as being very keen to work at developing further the ability of Fiat Automòveis to bring to fruition ambitious new projects by themselves. “We now have a team of development engineers who can do 90 per cent of the job of developing a new car platform and we want to build on this by designing types of car that are likely to appeal to consumers in specific parts of the region,” said Belini.

Fiat Automòveis has around three hundred research and development staff at the Betim facility at Belo Horizonte. They have unveiled a brand new "off road" styled coupé showcar at the Salão Internacional do Automóvel in São Paulo this week, dubbed the FCC Adventure, which is designed to demonstrate their ability to capture current market trends and fashions, as well as demonstrating their engineering expertise. The FCC Adventure has been one of the show-stoppers at the motor show, with visitor reaction being very positive.

The Fiat "Adventure" series of models has also been a big hit in Brazil in the five years since the concept was first rolled out. These low-cost vehicles offer the embedded 'off road' style and flair of an SUV but are more affordable and thus more widely accessible to the South American consumer. The "Adventure" range currently comprises of the Palio Weekend, Doblò, Strada and most-recently, the Idea. Other recent locally-developed projects present at the motor show, the regions biggest, include the zero-emission Palio Elétrico prototype. After a recent structural reorganisation Fiat Automòveis has also assumed overall responsibility for the South Africa market.