View as PDF - Rail Professional

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
As 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
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
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
Page 52 July/August 2013