There aren't many workplaces left where you can smoke on the job. But even in the new age of Ferrari - an age where words like sustainability and emissions reduction are mentioned more than horsepower and lap times - it's nice to know workers can hop off the production line, into a booth and chug away on a fag. It's not quite the image of swarthy men wielding spanners with roll-ups in the corner of their mouths. But as near as you'll get these days.
Hey, you there, stop building that Ferrari!
And if Luca di Montezemolo gets his way the smoking booths on the production line are going to get a whole lot busier, his masterplan for boosting Ferrari profits being a promised ... cut in production. It's an unusual boast for a car boss but the method in Montezemolo's apparent madness would be that selling fewer cars at a greater profit is ultimately better for business than selling them by the truckload. The same can't said for baseball caps and polo shirts, but we'll get onto that in a minute.
Montezemolo told a press event at Maranello that the firm made 7,000 cars last year and will reduce that number by an as-yet unspecified amount in an effort to maintain exclusivity, a word that came up again and again in his presentation. "We belong to an exclusivity culture," he said, "and we will make fewer cars than the market demands." The only problem being that he's fallen at the first hurdle, the 1,798 cars Ferrari has made first quarter this year already up four per cent on 2012. Oops.
LaFerrari: sold out. Perfect says Montezemolo
And what of the showrooms facing the challenge of selling fewer cars? "It is important that dealers must learn that to grow they must concentrate on quality, not quantity," said di Montezemolo. Which basically means loading cars with 'Atelier' extras, encouraging customers to indulge in personalisation programmes and generally up-selling wherever possible. With the additional hope that reduced production will fire up approved used sales and keep remaining stock within the dealer network.
Interesting too how Ferrari expects to divvy up that reduced production. You'd expect China, this being the default answer to most industry questions these days. But, said Montezemolo, "500 cars a year in China is not exclusivity. China is not the problem, we want to stay the same." Underlining that point, a pie chart of sales by territory for 2012 compared with projections for 2017 shows the Far Eastern market share growing just two per cent to 30 per cent, with America (currently a fifth) the area Ferrari wants to grow to account for around a third, mainly at the expense of Europe and the Middle East.
Expensive threads for 'clients', not 'fans'
And the branded goods? Well, we were told 95 items bearing the prancing horse are sold every minute. And they won't all be
458
s... Dealers looking to up their margins from metal to merchandise will need to turn their attention to a new and exclusive Ferrari Pr1ma range of clothing - 190 euros for a polo shirt, jackets from 1,500 euros upwards - intended for 'clients' as opposed to the teamwear sold by Ferrari stores to mere 'fans' as the bosses have it.
So. Sales of fancy goods and fags up. Cars down. And with that, Ferrari's future success is assured.