Stellantis just created a job title that tells you everything about where the company stands. Pablo Di Si, who until recently ran Volkswagen Group’s entire North American operation, has been named Chief Performance Officer — a role that didn’t exist until now.
The appointment, announced Wednesday alongside the elevation of Tianshu Xin to lead the China and Asia-Pacific region, is CEO Antonio Filosa’s clearest signal yet that Stellantis is in fix-it mode. Both moves take effect August 3.
Di Si’s mandate is explicit: execute the company’s Value Creation Program and help deliver its business targets. Stellantis dressed it up with words like “operational excellence” and “total enterprise transformation,” but strip the corporate veneer and you’re looking at a turnaround specialist hired to turnaround a company that won’t call it a turnaround.
You don’t invent a Chief Performance Officer position when things are going well.
Di Si spent years at Volkswagen building a reputation for grinding out results in competitive North American markets. His résumé reads like a checklist of exactly what Stellantis needs: commercial performance improvement, operational discipline, experience navigating complex global structures. Filosa is bringing in an outsider’s rigor to a house that, under former CEO Carlos Tavares, ran on ruthless cost-cutting until the wheels started coming off.
The Xin appointment is equally telling but for different reasons. He’s been inside Stellantis since late 2023, running Leapmotor International — the joint venture with Chinese EV maker Leapmotor that represents Stellantis’ best shot at relevance in the world’s largest auto market. Now he gets the whole Asia-Pacific portfolio and a seat on the leadership team.
Grégoire Olivier, who previously held regional responsibility, has been moved to “strategic advisor” reporting to Xin. That’s corporate for a demotion with a soft landing.
Xin’s elevation tracks with a simple reality: Stellantis has almost no organic presence left in China. Its legacy brands — Jeep, Citroën, Peugeot — have been marginalized by domestic Chinese competitors. Leapmotor is the lifeline. Putting the man who built that partnership in charge of the entire region is a bet that the Leapmotor playbook can be scaled.
Filosa has now been in the CEO chair long enough to start reshaping the organization in his own image. These aren’t cosmetic changes. Creating a performance-focused C-suite role and consolidating Asia-Pacific under a single operator represent structural shifts in how Stellantis intends to run itself.
The question is whether it’s fast enough. Stellantis has been bleeding market share in Europe, struggling with an aging product lineup in North America, and watching its stock price reflect investor skepticism about the path forward. A new org chart doesn’t fix a product pipeline or repair dealer relationships frayed by years of inventory mismanagement.
Di Si knows what a functioning machine looks like — he helped build one at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant and across VW’s U.S. operations. Whether he can impose that discipline on fourteen brands spread across every continent is another matter entirely.
Two appointments. Two signals. Stellantis is telling the market it knows the problems are real, and it’s importing talent to solve them. The company now has a Chief Performance Officer, which means someone at the top finally admitted performance was the problem.
Share this Story