FRANKFURT, June 22 (Reuters) - DaimlerChrysler will name trucks chief Eckhard Cordes to head its luxury Mercedes Car Group unit on July 28, Financial Times Deutschland reported on Tuesday, citing sources at the auto maker.
Cordes won key approval from employee representatives on the supervisory board by engineering a turnaround of its loss-making commercial vehicles division without resorting to layoffs, it said.
"He's done a brilliant job here," the paper quoted one source as saying.
DaimlerChrysler officials were not immediately available to comment. A spokesman had said on Monday the supervisory board had not yet decided, so any names mentioned for the job were still speculation.
Chief Executive Juergen Schrempp is reported to be unwilling to name a successor for Mercedes head Juergen Hubbert, whose contract expires in April 2005, without the support of unions.
Erich Klemm, deputy supervisory board chairman and head of Daimler's works council, has said publicly that he helped block Wolfgang Bernhard, the former number two at U.S. arm Chrysler, from taking over Mercedes as planned on May 1.
Cordes, 53, is one of Schrempp's allies on the management board. If he gets the job, he will have beaten other internal candidates such as Smart car unit head Andreas Renschler and former Mitsubishi manager Ulrich Walker.
On June 16, German economics weekly WirtschaftsWoche reported that Daimler's head of research and technology, Thomas Weber, had secured the support of unions and won the inside track to succeed Hubbert.