|
|
EUROWORKS EXOTICS HISTORY 5
A fairly unknown group of three Far-Eastern companies bought
Lamborghini for a rumored amount of 35,000,000,000 Lire, after
the paperwork was finished on January 21st 1994; Ubaldo Sgarzi
decided to leave the company.
Megatech, the biggest of the three received 28243 shares,
while Sedtco and VPower both got only 3530 shares each. The
new owners immediately fired the foreign managers put in place
by Chrysler, even Tim Adams was laid off, while he probably
was the best man for the job of president, but he was replaced
by Indrajit Sardjono. These three companies were in fact all
part of the same holding owned by Tommy Suharto and Setjawan
Djody. April 1994 brought a new president to the company,
Michael J. Kimberly, former top manager for Lotus and Jaguar
was attracted by the Indonesian owner to keep Automobili Lamborghini
SpA at the top of the super car market, one of his first decisions
was to evaluate a plan to put the LM 002 back in production
after it was halted in 1992, but the LM002 was never put back
online.
But the long awaited open top version of the Diablo did go
into production, the Diablo VT Roadster became an immediate
success and sales for the United States started to boom, the
US based subsidiary of Automobili Lamborghini SpA was renamed
to ALUSA, standing for Automobili Lamborghini United States
of America, and was headed by Robert A. Bramer. But things
started to worsen and the ALUSA encountered financial problems
from the start, they were unable to pay their supplies from
Italy. Some problems became visible in Sant'Agata too, the
Cala prototype was frozen and Megatech sold all its shares
to the other two, Mycom Sedtco got 22760 shares while V'Power
received 34140 shares, this latter was now also owner of Vector
Automotive, building the Vector M12 powered by the Lamborghini
V-12.
The economical crisis started to hit the Indonesian owners
hard and the much needed money for research on the Tipo 147
just wasn't available. The management tried to boost car sales
with the Diablo Trophy, but this idea didn't work just the
way they thought it would and the financial position of Automobili
Lamborghini SpA became even worse. In August 1996, Vittorio
Di Capua joined the Board of Directors; he almost immediately
got into a dispute with Kimberley who resigned on November
12 leaving the position of Managing Director to Di Capua.
The 1996 Balance Sheet showed a 17 Billion Lire loss and to
make things even worse, in 1997 the ALUSA ceased payment completely
and already owed the cost of about 30 Diablo's to Sant'Agata.
Di Capua decided to freeze all deliveries to their US branch,
luckily during January 1998 Platinum Motors offered to buy
the ALUSA stock both in the United States and in Italy. Under
the 'Excellence' name they became the new official US importer
for Automobili Lamborghini SpA.
By now Liugi Marmiroli, Gianfranco Venturelli and Sandro Munari
left Sant'Agata, Marmiroli's place was taken by Ceccarani
and Alberto Armiroli became the new External Relations Manager.
Di Capua decided Automobili Lamborghini SpA had to grow if
they wanted to survive, and the successor to the Diablo had
to be finished as soon as possible. But building the Tipo
147 turned out to be far more expensive than calculated and
the money was really running out in the Far East so it started
to look very bad for this small Italian exotic car manufacturer.
|
|
|
