New Renault Group CEO François Provost has said his top priority will be to continue to invest in new products and bring them to market faster. Speaking at a press conference announcing Renault’s first-half results for 2025, Provost also said he is committed to keeping Alpine in Formula 1. Provost, who had most recently overseen Renault Group procurement in a 23-year career at the French car maker, was announced yesterday as the successor to former CEO Luca de Meo, who had led a turnaround of the company over the past five years under his ‘Renaulution’ banner. The new CEO thanked de Meo for his work and said there will be no major change in strategy. However, he has vowed to “speed up execution” of the plan as part of “an obsession with competitiveness”. A key focus for Provost will be to cut development times. He said the 21 months taken to bring the new Twingo to the cusp of production will be the blueprint for the company from now on, as it looks to keep pace with an increasingly competitive market, which is now seeing a rise of lower-cost and rapidly developed models from China. Provost will also continue with the “value over volume” strategy, ensuring that each car is made according to demand so that “every car contributes to the bottom line”. He pledged to build stronger relationships with suppliers “to work with them earlier” in the development process to benefit both speed and cost. The Renault Group dealer network also gets Provost’s backing as they are “key for sustainable reasons and are long-term partners” invested in Renault’s success. F1 remains a key part of Alpine’s brand strategy, with the team receiving Provost’s backing for 2026 and beyond, despite poor recent performance. Group chairman Jean-Dominique Senard paid tribute to Provost as the outstanding candidate in a process that looked at internal and external candidates. Provost talked up his own credentials at the Renault Group, having worked on products on the sales and marketing side, and collaborated with group partners in other roles, including relationships with Nissan, Mitsubishi, Geely and Aramco. His desire is for Renault to achieve “among the best financial performance in the industry” and deliver “sustainably high profits”. Reporting on the Renault Group’s first-half results, chief financial officer Duncan Minto, who had been acting CEO after de Meo’s departure, said revenues had risen compared with the first half of 2024 but the operating margin had dropped from 8% to 6.1% due to a weaker performance in June, a decline in retail sales and pressures on the usually strong-performing light commercial vehicle division. While Minto said Renault had missed it targets, “the fundamentals are still strong”. He said Renault is now “an agile business built on two legs” with an electric vehicle arm and one building increasingly hybridised combustion engines. Minto said a retail focus of the group's sales rather than fleet - which are around 15 percentage points higher than the industry average - meant residual values were between four and 13 percentage points better than competitors. Ten new models were launched in 2024 with a further seven in 2025 and two facelifts, which means the group will have “the freshest product line-up of any OEM by the end of the year”. Order books are full for two months and factory capacity optimisation is at 90%, said Minto.
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