Leopoldo Pirelli

Leopoldo Pirelli   (businessman)
Born	August 27, 1925 Velate, Italy
Died	January 23, 2007 (Age 81) Portofino, Italy
Nationality	Italy
Alma mater	Polytechnic University of Milan
Parents	• Alberto Pirelli • Lodovica Zambeletti
Children	Alberto Pirelli (1954)
Spouse	Cecilia Pirelli
Relatives	• Giovanni Battista Pirelli • Marco Tronchetti Provera
Italian businessman who attended 3 Bilderbergs in the 1960s. At the time Pirelli was struggling with Italian union relations, changing Confindustria into a powerful lobby, and forging a multinational industrial group (a Bilderberg priority area).

Leopoldo Pirelli was an Italian businessman and heir to the Pirelli family rubber and cable industrial empire. He attended 3 Bilderbergs in the 1960s. At the time Pirelli was struggling with Italian union relations, changing Confindustria into a powerful lobby, and forging a multinational industrial group.

Early life

Leopoldo Pirelli was born in 1925 in Velate, Italy. His father was the prominent Italian industrialist Alberto Pirelli and his mother was Lodovica Zambeletti, daughter of the pharmaceutical industrialist Leopoldo Zambeletti. His paternal grandfather, Giovanni Battista Pirelli, was the founder of Pirelli.

Education

Pirelli graduated at the age of 25 in mechanical engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, immediately entering to work in the family business, in which he remained until 1992 when the leadership of the group passed to his son-in-law Marco Tronchetti Provera.

Career

Pirelli joined Pirelli as a member of the Pirelli SpA board in 1954. In 1956 he became CEO and vice-president of the company, then, in 1959, following the stroke that affected his father, also assumed the remaining operational responsibilities. Pirelli's company was now one of Italy's leading private companies – the third largest in turnover, behind Montedison and Fiat – with 76,000 employees and over 80 production facilities worldwide.

In this same period, however, the international tire market is subject to radical changes. On the one hand, the competition begins to take on global characters and European and American companies compete not only within individual local markets, but internationally; on the other hand, they are beginning to compete not only in terms of trade, but also in terms of direct investment, due to the increasingly frequent spread of protective tariffs at entry. Pirelli has to compete locally with US multinationals such as Firestone and Goodyear.

At the end of the sixties, at least as far as Italy is concerned, a further problem looms, that represented by the high cost of labor. Pirelli is one of the most determined among Italian entrepreneurs in emphasizing the worsening of the competitiveness gap with other advanced economies, arriving in 1967 to write directly to the Prime Minister Aldo Moro to point out the excessive weight assumed by social charges on total wages.

Yet, faced with the progressive deterioration of industrial relations in the factories, where from the summer of 1968 workers' protests became increasingly heated, he himself pushed the board of directors of Pirelli - in March 1969 - to approve a unilateral measure to accommodate some of the workers' demands, including the five-day working week for all workers and the reduction of weekly working hours for the same pay. The measure, was anomaly in the tense Italian trade union landscape of the "hot autumn" of 1968, but is rejected by the workers' unions, seen as an attempt by the company management to override the union power.

Confindustria

In these years Pirelli has been the guarantor, as a member of Confindustria council and vice-president since 1974, of a movement of young industrialists that attempts to promote a renewal of the Confindustria structure and its transformation from a service-providing organization into a political entity capable of representing the interests of industrialists before the government and the trade union movement.

In the spring of 1969 Pirelli became president of a commission, commissioned by the assembly of Confindustria to formulate a proposal for the reform of the association. The commission, which includes other heirs of great industrial families such as Gianni Agnelli and Roberto Olivetti, after a few months of work published, at the beginning of 1970, a document - the so-called Pirelli Report - in which it proposed a rethinking of the organizational structure of Confindustria, calling for its transformation from a simple coordination association to a more integrated system.

Dunlop alliance

Pirelli transferred the ideas gained during the work of the commission to his business activity, convincing himself that the decisive challenge for the Italian economy is the modernization of the management structures of large companies, in order to equip it to stand the test with world competition. This modernization, however, requires an increase in the production size of Italian companies, in order to be able to stand the comparison with the large American and European multinationals.

Aware of the difficulties that prevented further development of the company, Pirelli, in order to resist the growing international competition in the tire market, chooses to embark on the path of alliances with other European companies. After a failed attempt to establish a technological collaboration with Michelin, in 1965, the project finally seems to come to fruition in the early seventies, when the merger with the English Dunlop leads to the birth of a multinational group that manages 210 plants located on five continents, employs about 178,000 people and achieves a total turnover of over 1,400 billion lire.

On paper, the group has a good level of complementarity, in terms of both the products offered and the geographical distribution of its activities. While Pirelli is more present in the European and South American markets, Dunlop has significant operations in the United States, Asia and Africa. However, the high degree of complementarity does not make the new entity, created in the summer of 1971, the Union Pirelli Dunlop, an integrated reality. The decision to keep the two original management structures separate does not allow the process of managerial and production integration to be completed. The rather turbulent economic, social and political environment in which the Italian component of the Union was operating during the seventies then pushed the English component to refuse its support for the process of financial recovery undertaken by Pirelli, emptying the merger agreement for all intents and purposes of meaning, which was finally officially dissolved in the spring of [[1980].

The dissolution of the Union with Dunlop brings the Milanese group back to the same position that at the end of the sixties had prompted it to seek an international alliance, where the same problems resurface. The difficulties that had prevented the merger from being fully realized demonstrated the impossibility of creating an international alliance without seriously questioning the ownership structures, governance models and managerial practices of the companies involved.

Personal life

Pirelli and his wife Giulia Ferlito had a daughter, Cecilia (1952, married secondly to Marco Tronchetti Provera), and a son, Alberto (1954).

Death

Pirelli died on January 23, 2007, in Portofino, Italy.

[[Display born on::27 August 1925| ]][[Display died on::23 January 2007| ]] 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Bilderberg/1965	2 April 1965	4 April 1965	Italy Villa d'Este	The 14th Bilderberg meeting, held in Italy
Bilderberg/1967	31 March 1967	2 April 1967	St John's College (Cambridge) UK England	Possibly the only Bilderberg meeting held in a university college rather than a hotel (St. John's College, Cambridge)
Bilderberg/1968	26 April 1968	28 April 1968	Canada Mont Tremblant	The 17th Bilderberg and the 2nd in Canada

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.

References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 14.01.2025.
Wikipedia is not affiliated with Wikispooks.   Original page source here