Swedish manager, Bo Inge Andersson, meets all the job criteria, on paper, to run Russia‘s largest car manufacturing company.
He worked previously for Saab and General Motors and successfully turned around another large Russian car manufacturing company, GAZ, from losses of $1bn to annual profits.
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To secure access to such a unique story is a chance that happens once, maybe twice in a [journalist’s] career … And as someone who comes from the eastern bloc, the confrontation of East and West has always been an existential subject for me personally. |
In November 2013, Andersson was appointed CEO of AvtoVAZ, the largest Russian car manufacturer and one of the largest in the world.
It was created in 1966 in the west Russian city of Tolyatti and is best known in the former eastern bloc for producing Lada cars.
But, after two decades of post-Soviet privatisation spanning listings on the Moscow stock exchange to a takeover bid from Renault (which now owns 51 percent of the company with Russian state-own arms giant Rostec and smaller shareholders) the company is losing billions of rubles every year.
Andersson is the first non-Russian appointed to run the company.
As the ambitious new leader takes over, a clash unfolds between Western management and Russian employees who are nostalgic for former socialist working conditions.
The more the newly appointed CEO tries to improve the productivity of the firm – by introducing a zero tolerance policy for corruption, launching new Lada models and firing tens of thousands of workers – the more resistant the workers become to change.
Will the outsider be able to tame the workers of AvtoVAZ?
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| Bo Inge Andersson speaking at the launch of Lada Vesta, the company’s best selling car [Screen Grab/Al Jazeera] |
Source: Al Jazeera
