Ian Verchere
Aerospatiale Matra makes its long-awaited debut today as the reconstituted heavyweight of French aerospace when the chief executives of its merged entities - Yves Michot of Aerospatiale and Philippe Camus of Matra Hautes Technologies - present the new company to the world's press and global industry peers.
The Paris-based company had imposed a tight media silence in anticipation of today's big splash at the 43rd Paris air show.
The question uppermost in most minds, say industry experts, is just how well the new marriage will work.
Both companies remain very separate entities and, some would argue, are the victims of a forced marriage brought about by the demands of their German and UK partners within the Airbus consortium.
As private sector entities, British Aerospace and Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace have been pressing for several years for the privatisation of the old Aerospatiale.
Private
Earlier efforts by successive French governments to merge the aerospace activities of the formerly state-run Aerospatiale with the private sector Dassault Aviation prior to privatisation proved disastrous.
As a state-run entity imbued with the old dirigiste economics of post-war French industry, chivvying its elitist technocrats- France's much-maligned enarques (pupils of the grands écoles) - into a more pragmatic world of balance sheet economics and commercial realism has not been easy.
At their press conference today, therefore, the media - notably its French representatives - will be listening attentively to descriptions of how the new corporate giant will work.
United
On 11 June, the united board of the newly-privatised Aerospatiale Matra met for the first time under the chairmanship of Jean-Luc Lagardere.
In an interview in yesterday's Le Monde, the new chairman acknowledged that mixing the two cultures - the one corporatist, the other mercantile - was "a major problem".
He says Lagardere - of which Matra was formerly the high-technology division - was "fiercely independent, embodying the culture of a private company where financial risk was a feature of its backers".
Aerospatiale, on the other hand, was a "privileged arm of state and [French] sovereignty, which produced the Caravelle, the Concorde, the Airbus framework, France's nuclear capability and the Ariane rocket."
Source: Flight Daily News
