Alstom to acquire Canadian Bombardier trains
Rail life.
The announcement is imminent and would even be scheduled for this Monday, just before the opening of the Stock Exchange: Alstom, which has been negotiating firmly for weeks with Bombardier, will indeed buy the rail activity of the Quebec group for an amount around 6.5 billion euros. According to Wall street journal, the two groups concluded a preliminary agreement providing for the contribution by Bombardier to the French group of its entire rail division, which builds all kinds of trains, metros and other trams. In exchange for which the first Bombardier shareholder, namely the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec (32.5% of the shares), should return to the capital of the new Alstom-Bombardier group.
The two groups are expected to give birth to a world rail champion weighing 15 billion euros in turnover and likely to compete with the Chinese giant CRRC. One wonders why Alstom so badly needed to sell itself to the German Siemens a year ago … until the operation was blocked by the veto of the inflexible European policeman of competition Margrethe Vestager. Alstom and Bombardier employees have some concerns: if the two groups are already collaborating to supply train and metro trains to SNCF and RATP, there may be duplicates that are hardly compatible with the famous “savings”. of scale ”inherent in this type of operation. The Canadian employs 2,000 French workers in his factory in Crespin, in the North. For its part, Alstom has 9,000 employees spread over twelve sites in France.
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