Peugeot

The following entry is the one originally submitted by the contributors. The previous version of this entry that appeared in the original printing of the encyclopedia was not the one submitted by the contributors and was mistakenly used by the Publisher. The entry was written by Drs. Efthimios Poulis and Konstantinos Poulis, and the Publisher apologizes for submitting the wrong version of this entry for publication.

Peugeot is a major car manufacturer originated and headquartered in Europe, France. The company's industrial origins can be traced back to a steel foundry set up in a converted flour mill in the early 19th century. Since then, the company has gone through various transformations, manufacturing and selling a diversified range of groundbreaking products at their time (cold rolling, saws, watch and clock mechanisms, coffee mills, sewing machines, bicycles, irons, washing machines, food processors, radio sets, etc.). It can be said that the era of car manufacturing, which is the firm's core business activity, began in the late 19th century after a landmark agreement with Gottlieb Daimler and the company Panhard et Levassor.

Armand Peugeot, a dominant figure in the company's history, separated the automobile business unit from the firm's other manufacturing divisions (tools, two-wheeled vehicles, tricycles and quadricycles with a saddle) and in 1896, he founded the company called Société des Automobiles Peugeot. After some intra-family strife between cousins who inherited the original company at the beginning of the 20th century, the company reached a point at which it was constructing almost half of the French car production (just before World War I). However, the postwar era witnessed the threat of financial difficulties for Peugeot, which led to the separation and independence of the automobiles and cycling units again.

Peugeot has been expanding internationally to take advantage of new markets. Above, a Peugeot on display in Poland.

In the following years, Peugeot's strategy included various strategic decisions such as concentrating mass production in one site, launching popular brands (e.g., the successful 201), or minimizing product offering (e.g., the implementation of a single model policy with the 203 model). Later, Peugeot created a holding company that could control all the group companies and more production sites were built. A major feature of this era was the commencement of collaborations with other major car manufacturers such as Renault (in the late 1960s), Volvo (early 1970s), Fiat (early 1980s for the production of utility vehicles and people carriers), Ford (late 1990s for the development of diesel engines), and Toyota and BMW (in the 2000s for small engines models and petrol engines).

In addition to these decisions, some of the most notable strategic decisions of the firm seem to lie in its policy for mergers and acquisitions and its international expansion. Taking control of Citroën in 1976 and taking over Chrysler's European subsidiaries two years afterward provided growth for the firm, which was often hard to handle. Equally notable landmarks include international expansion to major developing countries such as China in 1985 and Brazil in 2001. Such BRIC countries as Russia now feature as major target markets for Peugeot. The firm proactively seeks to expand operations in developing markets that feature attractive market segments for medium-sized cars and can sustain international growth of an automobile manufacturer.

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