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scooters and motorcycles. The operations of the company include the bank PSA
Finance, a transport and logistics group (Gefco) and Faurécia, which is the most
important European equipment supplier. The market of PSA is primarily in Europe,
but the firm has a strong presence in Latin America and operates in Africa, Asia
Pacific and other parts of the world. PSA operates through five principal divisions:
cars, automobile equipment (Faurécia), transport and logistics (Gefco), finance and
other activities.
Fiat S.p.A
The Italian firm Fiat produces and sells commercial and agricultural vehicles, as
well as construction equipment. The group also produces engines and transmissions,
automobile components, metallurgical products and systems of production for its
own needs and for sales to third parties. However, the group has some other
interests such as press and communication. Fiat operates mainly in Europe and
North America by means of an important network of subsidiary companies. Fiat
has 12 operational sectors: Fiat Auto; agricultural and construction equipment
(Box New Holland CNH); trucks (Iveco), component cars (Magneti Marrelli);
systems of production (Comau); Ferrari; metallurgical products (Teskid); services
(Business solutions); Maserati; editions and communication (Itedi); Fiat powertrain
technologies and other companies. Fiat holds and uses 11 assembly plants (6 in
Italy, 1 in each of Poland, Brazil, Argentina, India and Serbia) and participates in
joint ventures with other car manufacturers.
Our analysis of the strategies of multinational firms largely focuses on the
reticular field of firms' networks. Creating graphs makes it possible to compile a
mass of information (labels) and allows a novel visualization of a city's place in
the firm's network. Our analysis is comparative so that we can examine the way the
various economic strategies articulate the territorial properties of the world's cities.
10.2.2
Comparison of Individual Firm's Networks
To connect the various components of a firm, we initially create graphs of individual
corporate networks. The method consists of representing filiations of the companies,
starting from their financial relationships. In a hierarchical way, these graphs are
produced from the database ORBIS (Bureau Van Dijk) and are supplemented with
information from firms' annual reports. These graphs enable us to observe the
distribution of the financial relationships between each element of the multinational
firm. Hereafter (Figs. 10.1 and 10.2 ), the nodes represent the companies and
the edges denote the ownership relationships among them. We used the metric
of betweenness centrality to highlight the centrality of each subsidiary in the
governance of each group.
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