NEWS worthy Clips (2/3)

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Driven by Design

For Pininfarina,, the adulation that greeted the GT was something else entirely: a brand-building coup. Pininfarina may be fabled for its 77-year history of iconic silhouettes for the likes of Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lancia and other first-in-class marques, but it has come to see that sort of high-end work as a powerful marketing tool for its real business—engineering and far more modest vehicles for giants such as Ford and Mitsubishi. Many big automakers, looking to cut costs, goose development time, and feed the insistence on customizable components, have begun farming out the development and production of specialty models that sell in small quantities—roughly 20,000 to 30,000 a year—to contract manufacturers in Europe, which assemble the cars in their plants.

It’s a rapidly accelerating trend in auto manufacturing: . Pininfarina now offers a complete suite of services that can take an automaker’s project from a blank sheet of paper to final delivery. And it has gambled a great deal to get there. The cost of ramping up for this sort of production ran to the hundreds of millions of dollars, pushing Pininfarina to a net loss of $29.5 million for 2006, despite a 53.7% jump in revenues. This year[2007], however, the company expects nearly 90 percent of its $1 billion-plus in revenues to come not from design, but from product-and-process engineering and the production of nearly 70,000 vehicles for Alfa Romeo, Ford, Mitsubishi, and Volvo. It also expects to be back in the black. “For us, design is just the ,” says Andrea Pininfarina, the mirthless third-generation chief of the company, a mechanical engineer by training. “Design gets most of the attention, but engineering and manufacturing is the massive part of the iceberg that sits underwater, invisible to everyone outside of our business.”

Vocabulary Focus

silhouette (n) ---a dark shape seen against a light backgroud

goose (v) ---to increase or speed up

farm out (phr v) ---to send work or responsibilities out to someone else

outsource (v) ---to buy parts from or have services performed by a supplier outside the company

tip of the iceberg (idiom) ---a small part of a problem which is really much larger than it seems

mirthless (adj) ---not showing real amusement or happiness

Specialized terms

adulation (n) ---华而不实的盛赞；阿谀奉承 very great admiration or praise for someone

marque (n) ---车款 a name of a range of cars, which is sometimes different from the name of the company that produces them

in the black (idiom) ---赚钱；有盈余 to earn more money than you spend