A page is turning for Valeo. Jacques Aschenbroich, the emblematic CEO of the second French automotive supplier (and tenth in the world) will hand over on Wednesday January 26. He will present to the directors of the group his resignation as general manager, to remain only chairman of the board of directors. Christophe Périllat, his successor designated since October 2020, eleven years his junior, will immediately replace him in the operational management of a group which is approaching 20 billion euros in turnover.
During the twelve years and ten months spent at the head of the company, the 66-year-old boss has profoundly transformed it. “I have the impression that everything I did before Valeo was to prepare for these thirteen years”, he confides in World. At the end of the 1980s, he worked in the office of Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, then in Jean-Louis Beffa’s Saint-Gobain during the decades 1990-2000. « Wednesday will be a real life changer for me, with a lot more free time. I’m going to start by leaving for ten days skiing in Austria, just to mark the fact that the new boss is Christophe Périllat. »
Strategic choices
This availability has not escaped those who, in the offices of the Republic, “hunt” the future leaders of public groups. In the past forty-eight hours, press indiscretions have given Mr. Aschenbroich as a possible successor to Stéphane Richard as chairman of the board of directors of Orange. But the news was perhaps premature for the one who is also a director of Total and BNP Paribas. “I have not been contacted”, he told the World.
If the boss of Valeo has caught the eye of the state shareholder, it is because his balance sheet pleads in his favor. “We made the right strategic choices in 2009, he said, looking modest. When I arrived, I discovered an obsolete organization. Valeo was fragmented to the point of absurdity, with 132 divisions which were all factories with their own general management, their own purchasing or logistics organization. »
Jacques Aschenbroich then arrives in the midst of an automobile crisis. He immediately makes drastic choices. “We started, six years before the “dieselgate” [scandale de trucages de moteurs, par plusieurs constructeurs, pour tromper les contrôles sur les émissions d’oxydes d’azote, qui a éclaté en 2015], by stopping all our diesel developments to bet on 48 volt technology, he says. The old Valeo was too diverse. We have focused on a few strategic areas: electrification, safety (driving aids, wipers, lighting), new mobility objects and connectivity. The old Valeo was too Franco-French. We have quadrupled our sales in Asia and increased the share of our German customers by 60%. »
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