By some estimates, Pininfarina has captured 30 percent of the Chinese design market, working with automakers such as Chery and Brilliance. CEO Silvio Pietro Angori says that revenues for design and engineering in emerging countries, topped by China, outstrip those from its traditional European market.

It's an historic shift for the company that has been a standard-bearer Italian design in the world as the company marks its 80th anniversary this year.

"There's a hunger that needs to be satisfied. It really is the new frontier," Angori said in a recent interview at Pininfarina's headquarters outside of Turin.

Pininfarina designed the four-door Chery A3, its biggest Chinese success to date, and the Brilliance Junjie sedan, which won the "Best New Car" award at the 2006 Beijing Motor Show. It has created some two dozen cars for Chinese automakers over the last 14 years, and worked on seven new models introduced at this year's Beijing Motor Show alone.

The Chinese cars do not show the cutting edge design of, say, the 1947 Cisitalia 202, a museum piece, or the 1971 Ferrari BB. The price tag of the Chery A3 of around euro7,000 to euro10,000 is far from Ferrari territory, but still at the upper end for the developing Chinese market. Pininfarina designs are aimed mostly at the upwardly mobile urban-dweller, and not the provincial market where locally designed cars costing several thousand euros are the bigger sellers, said John Zeng, a Shanghai-based auto analyst at IHS Global Insight.

And the market is only growing. Passenger car sales have grown from 665,000 units in 2000 to 8.3 million last year and are forecast to grow to 11.4 million by 2014, Zeng said.

Pininfarina got there first, though others like Bertone and Italdesign have followed. China plays a big role as the company redefines its business goals in the global economic slowdown.

In turn, Pininfarina has played an important role in helping China's fast-growing auto industry mature and gain know-how, especially at the higher end where bigger profits can be made, said Zeng, the auto anaylst.

"Chinese manufacturers are working very hard to move their product line up to higher segments, so the reliance on foreign design companies is going to be more and more important, in my view," Zeng said. Pininfarina has the strongest presence, said Zeng, quoting reports that they hold up to a 30 percent market share.

Bringing in outside talent also is a bid to help banish the Chinese industry's reputation for copying design from established automakers.

Local design houses so far lack the experience of Pininfarina, and have been mostly occupied with upgrades and face lifts, Zeng said.

Pininfarina's CEO Angori said the company is not just offering design, but also engineering, to its Chinese customers.

Revenues from Brazil, India and China -- of which China is by far their most important -- began to outstrip those from Europe four or five years ago, he said.

This is especially true as Pininfarina phases out production of cars for third parties, the part of their business hardest hit by the crisis. The design house had revenues of euro201 million in 2009, euro63.4 million derived from design and engineering, posting a loss euro31 million.

"We have redefined our industrial footprint. Our future is no longer the production of cars for third parties," Angori said, noting that the contracts on the three cars that remain in production -- the Alfa Spider, Alfa Brera and the Ford Focus Cabriolet -- all conclude at the end of the year.

Pininfarina already has sold its auto assembly and painting business, including its 900 employees, to De Tomaso Automobili SpA at the end of last year. The company now has 850 employees, plus another 700 at its joint venture with Volvo.

Angori, 48, took over as CEO in April 2009, nearly nine months after the death in a road accident of CEO and chairman Andrea Pininfarina, grandson of founder Battista "Pinin" Farina, who combined his nickname and surname to create the company name and a new family name.

Pininfarina's designs for China will continue to be done in Cambiano, "our cathedral," said Angori, but he is also establishing an engineering center in China.

Angori said Pininfarina's isn't worried about its work on mass-market Chinese car makers clouding its proud image as the creator of dream cars.

In reality, design has been Pininfarina's calling card, but never its bread and butter -- which has been as a contract maker. As that business fades out, design and engineering with increase in importance -- along with squeezing value out of the brand and production of environmentally friendly technologies.

"We had to redefine our future, because there has been this market confusion, a perfect storm that has created such difficulty," Angori said.