News   Jul 12, 2024
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News   Jul 12, 2024
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News   Jul 12, 2024
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The Future of Bombardier

That is good, but too bad the program had to be sold off at a discount after all the taxpayer support.

On the above, I was thinking more of the Ontario-made products.

The taxpayer support did its job. It's preserved the aerospace industry in Canada. And has made Montreal an assembly site for Airbus, with a program that is growing more important to Airbus itself. I'd say this is huge for Canada.
 
All I know is that you buy Bombardier stock when it hits $2 a share. Then you sell it. Then you buy it when it falls below $2 again. Bombardier is not a real company in a real business. You can't blame the company for being embroiled in politics and politicking because that is the only thing that backstops it's value from being zero. That's the $2 value, a belief that Federal and Provincial government will support it. If it wasn't controlled by a family you could say that it's parts had so-and-so value (and should be sold immediately to more competent foreign interests) but that is not currently the case.
 
All I know is that you buy Bombardier stock when it hits $2 a share. Then you sell it. Then you buy it when it falls below $2 again. Bombardier is not a real company in a real business. You can't blame the company for being embroiled in politics and politicking because that is the only thing that backstops it's value from being zero. That's the $2 value, a belief that Federal and Provincial government will support it. If it wasn't controlled by a family you could say that it's parts had so-and-so value (and should be sold immediately to more competent foreign interests) but that is not currently the case.

This viewpoint would be the death of an advanced economy in Canada.

Bombardier, after the sale of the CRJ, Q and CSeries programs will still be the fourth or fifth largest airplane maker in the world.

Consider the competition and their home market populations:

Boeing - 330 million, Airbus - 500 million, Embraer - 210 million, COMAC - 1.4 billion. And all their competitors getting plenty of overt and covert state aid. For example, developing composite technology takes years and hundreds of millions to develop. How do you get the government to pay for it? Develop it under a military program and then transfer them to your civil program.


If we want Canada to have an economy that is more than flogging rocks and cardboard skyboxes, we're going to get over this nonsensical idea that we can simply avoid protecting our national champions and that selling them off for parts will work out really well for us in the long run.

Having spent 2.5 years on a military education exchange in California, I get especially frustrated with all those ignorant enough to suggest that Silicon Valley is all about pure capitalism. Pure ignorance on the sheer amount of defence spending and activity in California. LA and the Bay Area are full of defence contractors. The third largest employer in Silicon Valley is not some social media company or consumer hardware company. It's Lockheed Martin.


People think innovation is happy accident. Some hippy kid probably wanted to map the world and made Google Earth on his 20% time at Google right? Nope. CIA contract.


When you consider what Bombardier was able to achieve without having a massive military side to their company or a full state funded R&D program, it's actually incredible. And I really am sick of people not understanding how throwing companies like BBD under the bus is selling out our future.
 
Who is going to pay to run that?
I thought the "if Ontario wanted" was clear enough. Compared to some smaller US systems with bilevels like Rail Runner or Music City Star it might even do decent trade, especially if somewhere like Smiths Falls got a population boost from it and from more frequent VIA.
 
kEiThZ, I appreciate your defence of the company and don’t have any argument with your points; However, Canada will never have the military industrial complex or domestic appetite for corruption and politicking to compete internationally in this sphere. Bombardier is fighting a loosing rearguard action. All the existing Western players will eventually loose market share to Asian competitors. I don’t cheer that but that’s how I see it.
 
kEiThZ, I appreciate your defence of the company and don’t have any argument with your points; However, Canada will never have the military industrial complex or domestic appetite for corruption and politicking to compete internationally in this sphere. Bombardier is fighting a loosing rearguard action. All the existing Western players will eventually loose market share to Asian competitors. I don’t cheer that but that’s how I see it.
Lose. Sorry, pet peeve.

Canada isn't on the outside looking into the world of military hardware. We're right in the thick of it. We're among the top 15 exporters of military hardware in the world, according to the Wikipedia article I just read, and export hundreds of millions of dollars in arms per year. Sure we're not on the level of the US or China but we're not a bystander either. Canadians love to paint a picture of ourselves as a peaceful, polite, weak nation whose economy runs on logging and mining, but that's mostly fiction.

Between Bombardier and Airbus (which now calls Canada its fifth "home country"), Canada is a major player in aerospace.

Edit: according to Airbus:

"The Canadian aerospace and defence industry is the fifth largest in the world, generating $27 billion (Canadian dollars) in revenue during 2016"

 
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And why was that?

Read the article. The contract was sole-sourced. The only company who was going to ever get it was Rotem.

Which raises the question: how is MBTA getting away with this? Considering that in their their last passenger car bidding process, they got replies from Rotem, Kawasaki and Bombardier...

Dan
 
And why was that?

Good question. MBTA's last order from Rotem in 2008 were 2 to 3 years late and had numerous mechanical issues causing capacity shortages until they were retrofitted (under warranty I believe) in 2017.

Not the type of record you would typically award a sole-source contract to; however maintenance teams do have gobs of experience with their parts by now.


Also interesting, the article says they're doing it because of climbing ridership, yet their dashboard (mbtabackontrack.com) shows a decrease since 2016 so I'm unsure why it's an urgent matter.
 
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Read the article. The contract was sole-sourced. The only company who was going to ever get it was Rotem.

Which raises the question: how is MBTA getting away with this? Considering that in their their last passenger car bidding process, they got replies from Rotem, Kawasaki and Bombardier...

Dan
As rbt said, Rotem had a pretty "interesting" first few years with the MBTA, but discussion on railroad.net seems to indicate that MBTA is happy with their performance once the warranty issues were resolved. @rbt the presentation below uses a ridership growth since 2012 as justification. It also claims Rotem were the only manufacturer who could meet the spec - which just goes to show that the way you write the spec can be very important :)

Here's the MBTA presentation on the contract: https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/...rement-and-consulting-services-accessible.pdf - states that cars are going to ship from S Korea and be paid for by State funds alone.

There might be a reason Kawasaki weren't in the frame this time:
 
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Bombardier joint venture snags $427M high-speed train contract in China

 
Bombardier joint venture snags $427M high-speed train contract in China

You can hate their way of governance but it's still amazing how they are committed to completing 160 cars in 6 months! Bbr can't get 204 streetcars to ttc in 4 years let alone hsr cars which are larger and more advanced
 

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