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Ferrari production to increase under Marchionne

The head of any company has to juggle the relationship between supply and demand. Of course, that applies to automakers too, even ones as high-end as Ferrari. And as with many other decisions, the way Ferrari has addressed supply and demand has come down principally to the principal.
Enzo Ferrari may have only wanted to sell as many vehicles as he needed in order to fund his company's racing department, but with the F40 - the last model made under his watch - Ferrari ended up increasing supply to meet growing demand. However, after Luca di Montezemolo took over in the wake of Enzo's passing, he started constricting supply. He figured Ferrari could sell 400 units of the F50, for example, so he built 399. More recently, Montezemolo undertook a course of action that spread Ferrari into more markets, while simultaneously constricting supply to increase demand and thereby profitability.
It's been a winning formula for Ferrari. Just days ago, the company announced record earnings up by 14.5 percent in the first half of 2014 over the same period last year, which itself had seen a 7.1-percent increase over the year before. Clearly the strategy has worked, but Montezemolo's successor is already eying a different approach.

Montezemolo steps down, Marchionne steps up as chairman of Ferrari

If the history of an automaker is divided up by the mandate of its leadership, then this is surely the end of an era for Ferrari. After repeatedly locking horns with Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne over a variety of issues, longtime Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo has announced his resignation.
Montezemolo has a long history with both Fiat and Ferrari. He started his career at the former before moving over to the latter in 1973 (only a few years Fiat took over half of Ferrari), starting out as Enzo Ferrari's assistant. He was appointed head of the Scuderia the following year, driving the team to success and subsequently taking over all of the Fiat group's racing activities. After the Prancing Horse marque struggled in the wake of its founder's death in 1988, Montezemolo was appointed to take it over in '91 and has been at the helm ever since.
Following Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli's passing in 2003, both Montezemolo and Marchionne were named to the Fiat board. A year later, after the passing of Gianni's younger brother Umberto, Montezemolo was named chairman of the Fiat Group (to be succeeded six years later by Agnelli heir John Elkann) and Marchionne its chief executive.

'Ferrari' is an oft-banned search term in China, but why?

The Internet has been a boon for car enthusiasts; after all, information about any car ever made is available at a few taps of the keyboard, whenever you'd like. Unfortunately, some Chinese motor heads are not quite as lucky because state censors have been intermittently banning searches for Ferrari on the country's micro-blogging sites, according to Time.
The problem has nothing to do with Maranello's supercars; it's what they represent. The Prancing Horse has become the symbol for so-called "princelings," wealthy young Chinese who use their parents' privileges in the Communist elite to afford luxuries.
The first bout of censorship came in 2011 when the son of then-high-ranking politician Bo Xilai was spotted cruising around Beijing in a red Ferrari, a vehicle much more expensive than he should have been able to afford. It started trending on Chinese social media, and censors began blocking searches for Ferrari in the car's red color. The Italian brand was censored again briefly in 2012 when a Chinese investor crashed his Prancing Horse into two other cars in Singapore.