“We are a UK company run by Brits, as far as the MoD is concerned,” he smiles. “The government likes competition and they view us as a very important part of the UK defence base.”
Dorrian, who started his working life as an apprentice fitter at 16, still speaks with a light Glaswegian brogue. Trained as a mechanical engineer, and rising swiftly to become the boss of Yard, the Glasgow naval engineering specialist, he has long nurtured good relations with MoD contacts in a career that has involved only two big job moves — to BAE Sema, the systems specialist that was part owned by BAE, and to Thales in 1999, after a brief stint as BAE’s deputy group managing director, defence systems.
“I decided Thales was the bigger challenge, it was pretty stimulating,” he says. Given BAE’s later problems you could also say he was prescient.
But deriding the opposition is not Dorrian’s style. Lord Freeman, Thales UK’s chairman and once an MoD minister, says Dorrian’s low-key approach, combined with his ability to get complex projects in on time and on budget, is exactly what the UK defence industry needs right now, as its methods and values come under increasing scrutiny.
“I sat on the other side of the table in the mid-1990s, and what do you look forward to?” says Freeman. “Someone who can negotiate without being impolite, or someone who thinks the quicker you can have a bust-up the better?” Former colleagues point to Dorrian’s professional-services background as his key experience. “Some in the industry are good at managing assets, others at managing people,” says Sir John Chisholm, Dorrian’s former chairman at Yard. “Alex is a people person: he has great personal skills, and he’s a robust manager with decent knowledge of the technology. Also, these days, buyers don’t just want things to show off at airshows, they need defence systems that work.”
The people-first approach reflects the style of Dorrian’s French boss, Thales chief executive Denis Ranque, who formulated the company’s distinctive “multi-domestic” strategy, setting up significant local interests with local managers in all the countries it wants to compete in. Some 76% of the group’s €10.6 billion (£7.4 billion) sales are now generated outside France, with significant businesses built in the Netherlands, Australia and South Korea (in partnership with Samsung) and, to a lesser extent, in America and Germany.
Dorrian insists it is more than just camouflage with profits whipped back to Paris. “We have invested more than £2 billion in the UK,” he says. “The majority of what we sell to the government here is developed by us here, and we are building our image as a strong UK company. I think we are doing pretty well.”
But could British companies do the reverse, carving out a chunk of the French domestic defence market? “Yes, if they were prepared to buy companies and invest in France,” says Dorrian. “But BAE has chosen to do America, and that’s a fair choice for them. The difficulty is in developing synergy, because the US is quite protective of its technology. It doesn’t like it being brought across the Atlantic.”
The global scope of Dorrian’s job is a long way from his upbringing, second son of a joiner, growing up in the Woodlands district of Glasgow. He says his family was never particularly ambitious for him. “I just took every opportunity that came along.”
Hence his apprenticeship at the pump maker Weir led to a degree course in mechanical engineering at Strathclyde University, before he grabbed a plum job at Yard, working on warship and submarine design. “That was important because it gave me access to customers at a senior level,” he says, “and I always had a bent towards systems.” As defence projects became more complex, that affinity propelled his career.
Many around him, however, wonder just how long the French can keep him at Thales, recently the subject of takeover speculation involving EADS, the aerospace giant. “Ranque did a formidable selling job getting Alex in,” says one who knows them both, “but it is a French company, and Alex can never get to the very top.”
Most expect Dorrian will eventually want to head a British firm, with BAE the obvious candidate, but the speculation just irritates him.
“What’s a British company? British-owned? BAE is more owned by Americans than by the British. I am not tempted to leave — I enjoy the job, I enjoy the people and I enjoy the global company here. It is satisfying to feel I am adding value; I would hate to be in a job where I don’t feel I am adding value.”
But he is going to be stretched running the UK and overseeing Thales’s other foreign subsidiaries, especially when his presence here, handling the big projects, is crucial. “Thales in the UK without him would be a much weaker vehicle,” says Chisholm.
And there is little evidence that Dorrian wants to globetrot. He and his wife are happily settled in Surrey, where he has time to indulge his passion for photography and classic cars — he has just sold an old Jaguar and is on the lookout for a replacement.
Does he have thoughts of ever going back to Scotland? No, he says carefully, though his son still works up there.
But in the sensitive dance between British and French national interests, being Scottish surely helps? Perhaps, he grins.
Has he ever worn a kilt to clinch a deal? He laughs. “I do have a kilt, and I certainly have worn it on several occasions in business, but never to get a contract.”
Then he adds that he wears the Graham tartan, in honour of his mother-in-law. His mother-in-law’s tartan? That, truly, is the mark of a man with real people skills.
