Chrysler Should Have Followed Road Map for Success to Poland

WROCLAW, Poland This capital town of Poland's southwestern province of Lower Silesia is one of the reasons the troubled nine-year relationship between America's Chrysler Group and Germany's Daimler-Benz , known as DaimlerChrysler during the years of merger, eventually fell apart.

It seems an improbable claim to make on a sunny spring weekend with crowds ambling through the picturesque Market Square in the old commercial district of Wroclaw.

But on a weekday, when the province's 26 institutions of higher learning, many of them dedicated to the study of science and technology, are buzzing with 131,000 students, something becomes alarmingly clear to Western eyes: Lower Silesia and other communities like it in central and eastern Europe are enormously attractive to global manufacturing companies as sources of well-educated, highly motivated, inexpensive production and technical talent.

As a result, many global automotive companies and their suppliers, such as Volvo Group, Saab Scania, General Motors , Siemens and Hyundai Motor, among others, are setting up factories, research-and-development centers, retail operations and other businesses in the region.

It is a short-term strategy to take advantage of low-cost labor and innovation and a long-term plan to develop profitable markets outside of the slow-growth markets of North America and Western Europe.

What global company in need of top technical talent wouldn't want to exploit an available labor source in which 7.1 percent of the population has a college degree or higher education and 55 percent hold secondary-school graduate diplomas that are equal to degrees from many four-year colleges in the United States?

What company doesn't understand the math of personal survival? For example, according to latest figures provided by Lower Silesian authorities, the province has a whopping 18.5-percent unemployment rate in 2006; and the people who are lucky enough to have jobs aren't making anywhere near the money the average automotive assembly line worker is earning in North America or Western Europe. For example, average annual per capita income in Lower Silesia amounts to 5,585 euros, or the U.S. equivalent of $7,589.

Many highly qualified people here are eager to work for companies such as the Volvo Group, and are quite willing to work for less than the money paid to comparably qualified employees in North America and in the more developed parts of Europe.

What does that have to do with the situation at Chrysler? Almost everything.

When Robert Eaton, then chairman of what was Chrysler Corp. of America, sold the company to Juergen Schrempp, then chairman of what was Daimler-Benz, for $36 billion in 1998, neither party gave much credence to the possibility of an industrial emergence in central and eastern Europe.

Instead, both men had a limited and not terribly honest vision of the deal they were entering. Eaton wanted to off-load a company that had flirted with bankruptcy several times before finally regaining something of a financial footing and success through sales of its then-popular minivans and big trucks.

Schrempp, with grand visions of solidifying Daimler-Benz's position in the lucrative U.S. market and possibly extending his company's reach into Asia with more acquisitions, was on a buying spree. Daimler-Benz was rich and powerful. Chrysler's 1998 buying price, $36 billion, was no big deal. And Schrempp and Eaton agreed to allay American concerns about a German takeover of Chrysler by dressing up the transaction and parading it before the public as "a merger of equals."