Alstom is in good shape. This is reflected in the results communicated by the company on Thursday January 20, at the end of the third quarter of the year 2021-2022. Revenue for the first nine months of 2021-2022 amounted to 11.4 billion euros, up 11% compared to the equivalent period last year.
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Above all, Alstom recorded 14.3 billion euros in order intake, an increase of 47%. In total, the order book reached 77.8 billion euros. “During the third quarter, Europe was the most commercially dynamic region”, notes Henri Poupart-Lafarge, CEO of Alstom. The company is aiming for an average annual growth rate of more than 5% by 2025.
Orders on all continents
In recent months, the manufacturer has, among other things, recorded an order for 54 very high-speed trains for the United Kingdom, won the maintenance of the Bucharest metro for the next fifteen years. He saw himself order nearly one hundred double-decker cars in Belgium, 17 trains for the Main-Weser network in Germany.
In November, China’s first fully automated, driverless high-rise monorail entered commercial service in Wuhu, and in December, the manufacturer’s latest generation of trams entered commercial service in Athens.
To fulfill these orders, the group, which has 72,000 employees worldwide, plans to hire 7,500 people, i.e. 6,000 engineers and managers and 1,500 workers and technicians, broken down as follows: 3,900 people in Europe (including 1 000 in France), 1,700 in Asia Pacific, 1,500 in North and South America and 400 in Africa, Middle East and Central Asia.
A contract in Ukraine will allow hiring in Belfort
“The difficulty will be to find people, believes Patrick de Cara, elected CFDT at Alstom’s head office. Rail, by 2030, will need 17,000 additional employees. Efforts must be made to improve the classification and remuneration of the welding trades. On our Belfort site alone, a contract won in Ukraine will enable us to hire about twenty. »
This apparent good health, however, contrasts with a stock market that fell sharply over the year. The company lost nearly a third of its value in 2021, as a result of the “digestion” of the Bombardier takeover a year ago. After being refused by the European Commissioner for Competition its merger project with the German Siemens, Alstom had finalized on January 29, 2021 the absorption of the Canadian Bombardier Transport to form the world number two in the sector, behind the Chinese CRRC , twice as big in terms of turnover.
Alstom had to review Bombardier contracts
By finalizing this acquisition, Alstom has accessed all of the contracts in progress or responses to calls for tenders of the company, and understood that it could lose money. “It was not a total surprise, insofar as by acquiring Bombardier, the leaders of Alstom had precisely the ambition to create value, by applying their methods, which allow operating margins of around 7 to 8 %, recalls Arnaud Aymé, of the firm Sia Partners. Throughout the first half of 2021, Alstom had to go behind the contracts. For the market for the replacement of RER line trains in Île-de-France, by discovering that which the association between Bombardier and CAF had passed, Alstom got away with it by announcing “additional services”. In other words, additional costs”.
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Restoring profitability may take Alstom a number of years. “Commercial and industrial synergies take time, continues Arnaud Aymé. Alstom can dip into its reserves, but it is only in four to five aces that we will be able to assess the benefit of this merger between Alstom and Bombardier”.