Luca de Meo
Luca de Meo is an Italian business executive who served as chief executive officer of the Renault Group from July 2020 to July 2025, and subsequently became chief executive of the French luxury group Kering, the owner of Gucci, Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta.
His move from motor manufacturing to luxury goods in 2025 was without evident precedent at that level and attracted considerable comment, since the two industries are conventionally regarded as requiring entirely different skills. De Meo's career had nonetheless been built substantially on brand management rather than on engineering, which was the argument made for the appointment.
Early life and education
De Meo was born on 13 June 1967 in Milan, Italy. He studied business administration at Bocconi University in Milan, graduating in 1992.
Career
Early career
De Meo joined Renault in 1992, working in marketing in Italy, and moved to Toyota Europe in 1998, where he was responsible for the launch of the Yaris in European markets.
Fiat
He joined Fiat in 2002 and spent seven years there, in a period covering the group's near-collapse and its recovery under Sergio Marchionne. He led the Lancia brand, became chief executive of the Fiat brand, and served as chief marketing officer of the Fiat Group.
The achievement that established his reputation was the relaunch of the Fiat 500 in 2007. The original 500, produced from 1957, was among the most recognisable objects of postwar Italian design; the new car reinterpreted it as a small premium product sold on character rather than on price, with extensive personalisation and a marketing campaign built around the brand's history. It sold far beyond expectations and demonstrated that a mass-market manufacturer could charge a premium for a small car, which the industry had generally believed impossible.
Volkswagen and SEAT
De Meo joined the Volkswagen Group in 2009 as head of marketing for the group, and in 2012 became the board member responsible for sales and marketing at Audi.
In 2015 he was appointed chief executive of SEAT, the Spanish subsidiary, which had lost money for most of the preceding decade. He returned it to profitability and, in 2018, created Cupra as a separate performance brand rather than as a trim level within the SEAT range. The decision was questioned at the time, since establishing a new car brand is expensive and rarely succeeds, and it proved among the more successful brand launches in the European industry, with Cupra eventually outselling SEAT itself in several markets and commanding materially higher prices.
Renault
The position in 2020
De Meo became chief executive of the Renault Group on 1 July 2020. The company was in serious difficulty: it had recorded the largest loss in its history, the alliance with Nissan and Mitsubishi had been destabilised by the arrest of Carlos Ghosn in Japan in 2018 and his subsequent flight to Lebanon, the product range was ageing, and the French state, which holds a substantial stake, had its own priorities concerning employment.
Renaulution
The plan announced in January 2021, named Renaulution, was structured in three phases: resurrection, concerned with margin and cash generation; renovation, concerned with refreshing the product range; and revolution, concerned with shifting the business towards technology, energy and services.
The operational changes were substantial. De Meo reduced the number of vehicle platforms and powertrains, cut fixed costs by billions of euros, and reversed the previous strategy of pursuing volume and market share, withdrawing from unprofitable markets and segments. He explicitly stated that the company would stop chasing volume, which for a manufacturer of Renault's size was a significant reorientation.
The product strategy relied heavily on the group's own history. The Renault 5, revived as a small electric car and launched in 2024, applied to Renault what de Meo had done with the Fiat 500, reinterpreting a car that a generation of European drivers remembered. It was received well and was priced considerably below most electric competitors. Revivals of the Renault 4 and of other names followed, and the Alpine brand was developed as a performance and electric marque with a Formula One team attached.
Restructuring
The structural changes were more ambitious than the product ones.
De Meo proposed separating Renault's electric vehicle and software activities into a company named Ampere and its internal combustion engine and hybrid activities into Horse, a joint venture with the Chinese group Geely. The reasoning was that the two businesses require different investors, different investment horizons and different cost structures, and that combining a declining but cash-generating business with a growing but cash-consuming one obscures the value of both. A planned listing of Ampere was cancelled in early 2024 when market conditions for electric vehicle businesses deteriorated, though the internal separation proceeded.
He also renegotiated the Nissan alliance. The arrangement agreed in 2023 reduced Renault's holding in Nissan from about 43 per cent to 15 per cent, matching Nissan's holding in Renault and giving each equal voting rights, an equalisation Nissan had sought for years and that Renault had resisted. In exchange Nissan invested in Ampere and the partners defined specific projects rather than a general obligation to cooperate.
Departure
De Meo announced in June 2025 that he would leave Renault, and departed in July. The company's results had improved substantially during his tenure, with operating margins rising from negative to the high single digits and net debt eliminated.
Kering
De Meo was appointed chief executive of Kering, taking office in September 2025. Kering owns Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and a number of other houses, and had experienced a sustained decline, driven principally by difficulties at Gucci, which generates the majority of the group's profit and which had lost momentum after a change of creative direction and a downturn in Chinese luxury demand.
The appointment of an executive from outside the luxury industry was unusual. The argument made for it was that de Meo's record is one of brand revival, at Fiat, at SEAT with Cupra and at Renault with the 5, and that Gucci's problem is a brand problem rather than an operational one. François-Henri Pinault, whose family controls Kering, remained chairman.
Approach
De Meo is regarded as a brand-led executive in an industry dominated by engineers and financial managers. His consistent method has been to find value in the history of a brand that its owners had stopped using, and to reinterpret rather than merely to reissue: the Fiat 500, Cupra and the Renault 5 all follow the same pattern.
He has been unusually public in his views on European industrial policy, publishing an open letter in 2024 addressed to European institutions arguing that the continent's motor industry faced an existential challenge from Chinese competition and from regulatory timetables set without regard to the industrial capacity to meet them, and calling for a coordinated European response. The intervention was widely discussed and he was subsequently prominent in industry representations to the European Commission on emissions rules.
Assessment
De Meo's record at Renault is among the more complete turnarounds in the European motor industry in recent years. A company that had lost eight billion euros in 2020 was profitable, debt-free and growing by 2024, and the product range had been renewed around a coherent idea rather than around segment coverage.
The unfinished parts are significant. The separation of Ampere and Horse was conceived as the structural answer to the transition problem facing every European manufacturer, and it was only partly executed, the listing having been abandoned. The Nissan relationship is stable but no longer the strategic alliance it was intended to be. And the fundamental problem he described in his open letter, that European manufacturers face Chinese competitors with lower costs and better electric vehicle technology, was not solved and is not solvable by any single company.
The move to Kering is the more interesting bet. The proposition that brand management is a transferable discipline is plausible and has rarely been tested at this level, and Gucci is a demanding test of it: a house that depends on creative direction, where the relationship between the chief executive and the designer determines the outcome, and where de Meo's own record provides no precedent.