Luca de Meo’s tenure as Renault Group CEO has been marked by an astounding turnaround in the firm’s fortunes.Steve Cropley finds out what drives him
ISSIGONIS TROPHY
Not often do you find yourself, twice in a few months, talking at length and one-to-one with a man as serially busy as Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo. This is a man with no spare time at all, someone who powwows with the French prime minister and leaders of Europe. His diary fills at a year’s notice.
Yet the reason for this meeting is special. We are seeking time with de Meo to offer him our magazine’s highest accolade, the 2024 Issigonis Trophy, largely on the strength of the series of dazzling achievements he listed in our previous interview (Autocar, 23 October 2023): record profits in his company’s 126-year history, posted less than three years after sustaining ruinous losses running at €140 million a day.
It has been one of the greatest recoveries in corporate history, not just automotive, accompanied by an expanding and highly credible brand and model strategy topped by the traffic-stopping launch of a brand-new Renault 5 electric supermini later this year. Demand for the car is already surging, six months ahead of delivery.
Despite all this, the portents of our latest meeting aren’t good. De Meo has spent most of his day at Renault’s annual shareholders’ meeting, where reams of data is traditionally transmitted at pace to a hard-to-impress audience, where small stakeholders traditionally ask unanswerable questions, where dozens of resolutions must be put to a vote and where even the CEO’s salary (although considerably less than that of a Stellantis or Volkswagen chief) gets enviously discussed by folk whose stake in the company may not reach four figures. Who would want to do a press interview after that?
Yet de Meo smiles broadly as he arrives in our bare meeting room behind the vast auditorium used today to house the shareholder body. He is well known for normality; after greetings we immediately start discussing the effects of his recent, highly unusual ‘Letter to Europe’, the self-styled assemblage of unbiased facts, data and suggestions covering the automotive industry and its competitive situation, recently circulated in 13 languages to experts, industry leaders and politicians ahead of the European elections, in an effort to help frame better regulations for tomorrow.
De Meo is greatly concerned that Europe (and thus the UK) lacks a cohesive industrial strategy and would love to be involved – wi
