NEWS worthy Clips (3/3)

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Driven by Design

Pininfarina is, by far, the largest design house to have pivoted to the contract-manufacturing business. And it may have had little choice. Around 2000, with the global economy deteriorating and the competition , Pininfarina’s fancy bloodlines were starting to look a little thin. The imperative was clear: deversify and grow—fast. Andrea Pininfarina remade his design studio by boosting its head count to more than 3,000 employees; launching a sleek, 129,000-square-foot engineering center on its Turin campus; and expanding its engineering and manufacturing operations to Germany, Sweden, and Morocco.

“No European design studio moved to niche car building on a scale like Pininfarina,” says Ken Okuyama, the company’s former design director. “Many in the business thought it was moving too fast, too soon. But Pininfarina saw before most that outsourcing production was the future.”

Design may account for only a share of Pininfarina’s revenues, but its true value to the organization is almost incalculable, since the cachet of the Pininfarina look remains a powerful lure for the likes of Ford, Mitsubishi, and Volvo. “You use … Pininfarina’s design mystique to sell the car.” Says David O’Connell, chief designer for Mitsubishi Research and Design America. “To be able to say the car is developed Pinifarina adds a lot of status to the vehicle.”

Similarly, Pininfarina benefits from its association with Maserati, which may explain why Andrea beamed as he stood next to Maserati’s Ronchi at the Geneva auto show, witnessing the GranTurismo’s rapturous reception. He knew that one next-generation Maserati would, more likely than not, pull in a far bigger —a contract to crank out 20,000 or 30,000 humble-but-profitable cars for Detroit or maybe even Beijing. It’s a cold, brutal bit of business logic, all dressed up in fine Italian style.

Vocabulary Focus

heat up (phr v) ---to become more intense

the likes of (idiom) ---similar to someone or something else

pot of gold (idiom) ---a sudden amount of wealth

Specialized terms

bloodline (n) ---血脉相连的成员 all the members of a family group of people or animals over a period of time

cachet (n) ---值得尊崇的特质 a quality which marks something as special and worth respect and admiration