Renault: Luca de Meo to lead Ampère EV subsidiary
Renault has unveiled the senior management team for its EV and software subsidiary Ampère. Luca de Meo, currently CEO of the Renault Group, will personally take charge of the new management team at Ampère. And he will be joined by two managers to handle day-to-day operations.
According to Renault, Josep Maria Recasens and Vincent Piquet will be appointed Chief Operating Officer and Chief Finance Officer, respectively. Recasens worked at Seat for a long time (under de Meo, among others) before joining Renault in 2021. He was named Chief Strategy Officer in February 2023 and is in charge of the brand in Spain. Piquet joined Renault in 2019 after a career at General Electric. He was appointed CFO of the Renault brand in 2022, reporting to de Meo and Thierry Piéton, CFO of Renault Group. “These appointments at the highest level of the Group will ensure the best support to execute Ampère’s innovative and profitable plan, including its envisioned initial public offering,” the French carmaker writes.
There is also an update on the timetable: The carve-out of Ampère is scheduled for the second half of 2023. Ampère will announce further details at a “dedicated Capital Markets Day” later this year. The exact date has yet to be communicated.
In his statement, Luca de Meo emphasises the preparatory work of the past two years, which allows Ampère to start with a highly integrated EV supply chain. That means that Renault’s EV subsidiary can draw on existing production infrastructure from the start, such as the manufacturing ecosystem ElectriCity in northern France, where the Renault 5 and Renault 4 will be built. Up to 400,000 electric cars per year can be produced there, with 80 per cent of suppliers expected to come from within a 300-kilometre radius.
“Combining the agility of a pure player with the strengths of an established OEM makes Ampère unique,” says de Meo. “Now, we go to execution mode. The more we focus, the more obvious the opportunities become for Ampère to spearhead the shift to electric and software.”
Renault first released concrete information about Ampère’s future back in November 2022. In its latest announcement, the French carmaker highlights its goal of reducing costs by 40 per cent per vehicle for the next generation of EVs. Ampère targets an average annual sales growth rate of 30 per cent by 2030. With 80 per cent of its investments already made, Ampère should turn a profit as early as 2025 and achieve double-digit margins by 2030.
The Ampère team will comprise around 10,000 employees, one-third of them engineers. These are not only to develop in the field of electric drives but also to make Ampère an important player in “Software Defined Vehicles”. As concrete hardware development goals, Renault mentions – among other things – the reduction of the variety of parts by about 30 per cent, a production time of a maximum of ten hours per vehicle and a drive efficiency of over 90 per cent from the battery to the wheel. In addition, engineers will explore “current and upcoming battery technologies from sodium ion to solid state.”
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