Fiat tops up

Fiat Auto Poland is creating 1,000 new jobs at its car manufacturing plant in the Silesian city of Tychy. This comes as the plant is expanding its production to include the new Fiat 500 this June and, starting next year, production of the Ford Ka.

As Fiat Auto Poland's commercial director Wojciech Halarewicz explained, despite the fact that many Poles are looking for work abroad, the recruitment process is going well, with over 3,000 applications already received. Currently, around 3,700 people are employed at the Tychy plant and Fiat estimates that around 4,700 will be needed to accommodate the start of Ford-Ka production.

The new Fiat 500 is a modern version of the legendary Fiat 500 of the 1960s. The official premiere of the car will take place in Turin on July 4 (on the Fiat 500's 50th birthday) and it will be presented in Tychy two days later. The Polish plant is expected to produce nearly 60,000 of the model this year. The price of the vehicle is expected to be around E10,000 (zł.37,957) and the bulk of production is intended for export, mainly to the Italian market. Next year the number of Fiat 500s produced in Tychy is expected to more than double to around 150,000.

Fiat Auto Poland produced 308,293 cars last year and it plans to increase this number to 344,000 this year. In the first three months of the year, the firm produced over 86,600 new cars, giving Fiat 51 percent of the car-manufacturing market in Poland by volume in Q1. After production of the Fiat 500 and Ford Ka is launched, the company expects the annual production figure to reach 500,000.