Shareholders this week put Fiat’s ambitious chief Sergio Marchionne within reach of his dream to position the iconic Italian automaker as a force to reckon with in the global marketplace.

Italy’s largest private employer, created by the legendary Agnelli family and a symbol of the country’s post-war industrialisation, won the green light to spin off its non-car activities.

John Elkann, Fiat’s 34-year-old president and the grandson of historic boss Gianni Agnelli, thanked the shareholders for their approval by a large margin, calling the vote a “historic” event that “gives birth to two Fiats”.

Mr Marchionne is positioning the group for the global fray as major world automakers seek new alliances, a year and a half after orchestrating a tie-up with near-bankrupt US automaker Chrysler, of which Fiat now owns 20 per cent.

“It’s a very good day for the auto branch,” since it will “be able to choose its own destiny without worrying about the consequences” for the rest of the company, the maverick chief executive officer said.

Fiat “will have the total ­freedom of choosing to go ahead with whoever it wants,” said Mr Marchionne, who is also the chief executive of Chrysler.

Analysts expect the new structure to help Fiat not only integrate with Chrysler but also to form other alliances as new players come onto the scene from emerging economies such as Russia and India.

Credited with rescuing Fiat from the brink of collapse in 2004, Mr Marchionne has said Fiat and Chrysler combined should produce six million vehicles by 2014, up from four million today.

The operation will leave a car-only Fiat with its own brand plus Ferrari, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and its components and motor activities, while its truck-making and agricultural and construction machine makers will be part of a new company called Fiat Industrial.

Fiat Industrial will be listed on Milan’s stock exchange from January 3, 2011. Each of Fiat’s current shareholders will receive one share of Fiat Industrial, with the Agnelli family holding 30.4 per cent of both groups.

The spin-off, announced in April and set to take effect on January 1, 2011, will “resolve one of the strategic issues that over the past years has been a thorn in Fiat’s side,” Mr Marchionne said before the vote. The car and non-car activities have different strategies, markets and capital needs, the Canadian-Italian said.

Fiat, which assumed operational control of Chrysler in June 2009, will see its stake rise to 35 per cent by the end of 2011, with an option to improve that to a controlling share once the US firm pays back its debt to the US government.

Mr Marchionne said the plan would ensure “a safer future” for Fiat’s 190,000 employees around the world and for its Italian workforce of 80,000, but he again said Italy needed to improve competitiveness.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.