YOU have to hand it to them: those Scots get everywhere.

“Being Scottish is a good thing in international business, there’s no doubt about that,” says Alex Dorrian, head of international operations at the French electronics giant Thales. “Being a Scottish engineer is quite acceptable too.”

And he should know. In his five years at Thales, the last two as UK chief executive, Glasgow-born Dorrian has achieved a remarkable feat: he has won the French a sizeable chunk of the British defence market while climbing almost to the top of one of their largest global groups.

In the process, he has helped transform Thales from a minor player in Britain to the biggest defence contractor after BAE. Recently, it has won a string of impressive contracts: involvement in the multi-billion pound deal to build two new aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy, prime contractor slot in the Future Integrated Soldier Technology (Fist) project for the British Army, and agreements to build unmanned surveillance planes and tanker aircraft.

When President Jacques Chirac pumps Tony Blair’s hand on his visit to London this week, he will have quite a bit to thank him for.

And he will have Dorrian to thank, too, because the Scotsman is now seen as one of the most effective defence-industry bosses around — which is why the French firm recently added to his responsibilities, putting him in charge of all Thales’s businesses outside France. Industry gossip suggests that Dorrian’s success has put him on many headhunters’ lists, and Paris wants to nail his feet to the floor.

Sitting in Thales’s central London bolthole — three rooms leased from a French bank in St James’s Square — Dorrian, 58, doesn’t look the itchy-feet type. Slim, bald, and carefully courteous, he is the most understated Glaswegian you could meet, palpably different from the aggressively rumbustious salesmen that used to dominate the arms industry.

But then these days big defence deals are more about intricate systems and complex partnerships than big guns and heavy kit. Thales’s expertise in both military and civil markets, where it provides security encryption systems, air-traffic control software and aircraft electronics, appears to be giving it an edge.

And, most importantly, it has put down real roots in Britain, buying Racal for £1.3 billion in 2000 and adding other acquisitions, allowing Dorrian to pitch Thales to the Ministry of Defence as a UK business with UK employees (11,000) selling UK technology. That has provided some interesting options for the MoD, which has long been criticised for being too cosy with the biggest British suppliers.

Even so, many were amazed this summer when Thales grabbed a major share of the £3 billion project to build new aircraft carriers, after the MoD forced BAE into an alliance with the French. BAE was widely thought to be furious, with reports appearing in the press of a “heated exchange” between BAE boss Mike Turner and Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary.

Dorrian shrugs. “We have no argument with BAE over the carriers. Bear in mind that we started from a position of cut-throat competition and sometimes things were being done that we found difficult to accept and not react to.”

Such as? “Well,” he says, “things you read in the press. But having got to that point, the MoD decided the programme was so large, the ships so big, the facilities in the UK so spread around, that the risk was lower if we did it together.”

Thales is also working on an aircraft carrier for the French navy, but Dorrian stresses that its work for the Royal Navy is a British endeavour.