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It’s a real mistake that the industry makes - that you get all of the competitors bidding for everything all of the time. We’re just not interested in that.


Lorna Slade spoke to Terence Watson, UK Country President and Transport Managing Director UK & Ireland for Alstom, about bidding selectively, HS2, alliancing, and what passengers really want from rolling stock


s Watson put it: ‘In mature countries like the UK, Italy, Spain, France and Germany we have people like me who are country presidents, so we look after all the interests of Alstom and have a chat with the governments and can compile reasonable, standard policies and approaches to how we govern our little empire. But we also try and have the guy that’s doing that also managing one of the biggest, or biggest, businesses, and in my case it’s transport.’ At that point I was mesmerised by Watson’s confident, relaxing


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energy that made it all sound so easy. He was in France with Alstom for 15 years, running the Transport division’s North Europe business for half of that time. And then, as he put it, ‘I went into corporate life and looked after North Europe for the whole of Alstom from Levallois-Perret,’ (Alstom’s head office). Back in London for a year and a half now, Watson took over as MD of the UK Transport business with a remit to get it moving to a different scale and shape. ‘And of course, the country presidency was an easy transition for me because of the work I did at corporate.’


Clearly proud of Alstom, Watson gave a run-down of all the divisions and their business wins. And the company is after all, something to be proud of. The UK arm alone, which has operations in power, grid and transport, had sales of more than £1 billion in 2012/13 – the fourth year in a row that sales have topped that mark and representing a doubling of turnover since 2006.


Are we in the UK, or not?


One can only assume that the big, juicy rail developments in the UK are a Smörgåsbord of opportunity for Alstom therefore. ‘Er… let’s go backwards first,’ said Watson. ‘Alstom was probably the biggest supplier of rolling stock in the UK market through the boom years just pre- and post-privatisation. At the same time, the rest of Europe either didn’t privatise as quickly, or at all. The


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development of the Asian and Indian market was a distant dream, with no chance for Western organisations to go there. But moving forward, we reached a point where Alstom’s interests did move from the big old domestic markets to those developing markets, and one of the reasons I went to France was to look at how we could work with new partners in these new strange places. And it all started to boom. We then had a period of time where the UK procurement process had slowed down, and these other places were going crazy; and when Alstom returned its attention to the UK and looked at the demands here, we didn’t really have products to suit that second wave of market. They were substantially successful elsewhere, but not really ripe and ready for the UK market that existed then. ‘So we decided that rather than fight to win bids for rolling


stock with the wrong products, we would focus on maintenance and rationalising our organisation in the UK. Our first principle was to make it profitable, second was to try to expand other product lines, and we let the market slowly come back, which is where it is today.’ The one exception is the highly successful WCML Pendolino fleet which according to Watson has helped the company think about where it sees itself in the future, which is very much more


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