INTERVIEW
P104
MV AGUSTA PRESIDENT AND CEO GIOVANNI CASTIGLIONI: PART 2
We pick up the story with Alan
quizzing Castiglioni about the
Mercedes AMG partnership.
I
t turns out your hoped strategic
partner (Mercedes AMG) bought into
MV Agusta purely for PR reasons?
Yes, they made no strategic use of MV.
Zero. At the end of the day, when we did
the deal in 2014, MV Agusta needed a cash
injection of around 50 million Euro. Mer-
cedes' proposal was to invest 20 million,
purchasing the 25 percent shareholding,
plus a contribution in kind, which they
could value at up to 40 million Euro.
Would this have been in product
development?
No, it was strictly only marketing and
sales cooperation, by putting MV Agusta
into 360 AMG performance centers, which
by their calculation would have allowed us
to sell about 2000 more units.
At the end of the day nothing happened,
and the reality is that we put their logo on
our bike and they put ours on their car, and
that's been the sum total of our collabora-
tion.
For us, the link with AMG was important
for the brand awareness of MV Agusta,
and the increased visibility of getting our
products into Mercedes points of sale in
strategic locations around the world would
have been a boost for the company; they
have such strong marketing power. But the
In Part 2 of our chat with MV
Agusta President and CEO, Giovanni
Castiglioni, the Italian explains
the failure of the Mercedes AMG
partnership and how he plans to fix the
company's ills with an American twist.
BY ALAN CATHCART
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEL EDGE
Moving Forward
