SAINTS PRESERVE US

Severe Unplanned Unintentional Impact with Ground

It’s been a strange 11 or 12 months for many businesses. Airlines don’t fly. Cinemas don’t screen films. Restaurants don’t seat diners. Hotels host no guests. And then there’s Bombardier Inc.

The publicly traded though family-run company was once the beacon of Quebec Inc., a surge of locally owned and operated businesses that surfed a profitable wave of nationalism in the wake of the province’s late 60s Quiet Revolution. Bombardier was formally established in 1942. It manufactured snowmobiles (its original raison d’etre), motorcycles, busses and light rail carriages. The company then reached for the sky on the wings of its CSeries passenger jet whose innovative design was miles ahead of any craft on staid old Boeing’s drawing boards. Bombardier does not make any of these things any more.

Bombardier stock is no longer a key indicator on the TSX, the Toronto Stock Exchange. I don’t pay much attention to my investment portfolio. That is work best left to savvier people than me and I don’t begrudge them their fees. Anyway, I know myself and so I know that should I become obsessive about my holdings, I’d be really obsessive, like a teenaged Catholic boy with unfettered access to porn. Nonetheless, when my 2020 summary statement arrived in the mail, I scrutinized it, praying a portion of my future wasn’t beholden to the dog stock of a debt-ridden and failing company (on a somewhat related note CargoJet has been doing very well of late).

Recently, Bombardier announced that it would concentrate on its ceaselessly pared and newly designated core business: luxury executive jets. Then it sold its Learjet brand. Gee, that move didn’t leave a whole lot of product to manufacture and sell. This was an instance when a long established and carefully cultivated corporate brand should have been leveraged to mitigate perceptions of disastrous mismanagement. But Bombardier no longer possesses the cachet provided by such an invisible, invaluable and intangible asset.

These are green and lean times. So, imagine the near-impossible, a corporation or celebrity willing to splurge on a new private jet instead of renting flights on an existing one. Lear remains the Rolls Royce no matter who owns the brand (see Indian motorcycles). Cessna’s in the game, respected, synonymous with safe and reliable small planes (pilot error notwithstanding). The third option is a Bombardier Challenger, the last desperate all-in high stakes gambit of a doomed company. Hmm. I know for sure what I wouldn’t buy.                  

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of business writing since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is coming soon.  So is spring. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9, use that thingy on the right.