Tellier....What's next,,,,,“My job is to bring a period of consolidation to Bombardier, where we realign the organisation,” Tellier says.
Realignment has already meant 20,000 job cuts. Restructuring in the rail business was necessary, Tellier says, because the company had excess capacity after a series of acquisitions.
Sites were closed in Portugal and in Derby, and other facilities in Switzerland, Germany, Sweden and Wakefield will be scaled back.
Tellier, for ten years head of the Canadian National rail company, is a diplomatic admirer of Britain’s railways, despite the recent upheavals, and believes that there are still opportunities in the UK for his slimmed-down rail transportation operation. “This is a country where the rail network has to be first class,” he says. “Both private and public investment has now been made and it should produce, in time, very good results.”
Bombardier’s prospects are strong, once the restructuring is completed, Tellier believes. “It’s a company with a tremendous sense of entrepreneurship, very strong on innovation and risk-taking; a good labour force and a multilingual, multicultural company,” he enthuses.
Now that Bombardier has paused for breath, it should also be able to reduce its debts and put itself on a firm footing. “Even if we chose to build the CSeries there will be no new planes for five years, which will give us time to amortise that development cost. We have all these great products but now we must —really start to make money from them,” says Tellier, voted Canadian businessman of the year by his peers twice in the past two years.
POLITICAL ANIMAL
THINK of Sir Humphrey running Network Rail, then Rolls-Royce — and making a success of them. Paul Tellier’s career has been something like that, although the jury is still out on whether he will make a success of Bombardier. From Joliette, Quebec, the son of a provincial cabinet minister spent seven years running Canada’s civil service before moving to Canadian National in 1992. Over a decade he turned a money-losing railway into North America’s most profitable. Tellier, who studied politics at Oxford in the 1960s, after a first degree in law, believes his experience of government gives him an edge in business. “When I walk into Patricia Hewitt’s office I’m very comfortable. I know what she does, what she’s thinking. That’s a huge asset,” he says.