BOB DAVIES opens the door to his borrowed office with a hesitant smile. “Wasn’t too hard to find, then?” asks the Arriva boss, gesturing round at the bus station looming outside.

The vast brick hangar, just off a main road in north London’s dilapidated Wood Green, is pretty hard to miss. Likewise Arriva’s growing fleet of smart new London buses, servicing a bundle of routes, part of a network of public-transport contracts that now stretches not just across the UK but into Denmark, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany, too.

In fact, Sunderland-based Arriva, whose shares hit a five-year high last week, has been spreading its tentacles across the Channel for some time now. In the next fortnight Davies should complete his second acquisition in Germany, giving him a further foothold in the most lucrative transport market in Europe. In four years Arriva’s continental operations could overtake its UK bus and rail contracts in turnover.

That shows just how far the firm has come since the 1990s, when it ditched its original name, T Cowie, and much of its original motor-trade interests. Central to the change has been the six-year tenure at the top of former Ford and Ferranti executive Davies.

Trained in finance, with an eye for detail and costs, 55-year-old Davies has pushed Arriva into steady growth while remaining, to many outsiders, something of an unknown quantity. This, I am told, is the first profile interview he has granted. The Sheffield-born bus boss just doesn’t like seeing his own name up in lights.

Or, given the regular press flak attracted by train and bus firms, he is smart enough to keep his head down. In London, where Arriva and others have benefited from the huge subsidies paid by Mayor Ken Livingstone, the “fat cat transport bosses” (London Evening Standard) took a pounding last year over increased profits and bumper pay packets. Where’s the incentive for profile there? Yet if £625,000-a-year Davies is wary, he conceals it well. Lounging back in an armchair in the office of a London colleague, tall and lean with a domed forehead receding into thinning hair, he tackles the subject of just what Arriva is, and what it wants to be, with characteristic, low-key pragmatism.

“We’re a service company,” he says baldly, “we just happen to use things with wheels.” Only later does he add: “We want to be the best transport company in Europe, not just in size, but also in reputation.”

Perhaps the surprise is that Arriva is in Europe at all — a destination that its UK rivals (First, Go-Ahead, National Express, Stagecoach) have avoided. Too much complication, too many languages.

“Other UK groups targeted America,” shrugs Davies, “but I think the mood is changing. We’ve gone through privatisation and the cycles that follow, but Europe is just getting there. It’s a £100 billion market and it’s an enormous opportunity." Clearly, Arriva’s growing legion of stock-market fans agrees. The firm’s likely acquisition of a 77% stake in the Bavarian rail operator Regentalbahn, to add to its purchase of Berlin-based PEG in April, follows Davies’s strategy of taking stakes in local operators, and using those as stepping stones to apply for regional tenders. It’s already paying off in other countries.

“We think we have a business model that works,” says Davies. “We now run 40% of the buses in Denmark and are the only private rail operator there. We were the first private bus operator in Holland. We run all the buses in the north, and also some trains, and we are building on that to get business near Rotterdam. But Germany is the biggest public- transport market of the lot.”

That’s compensation for the squeezing of opportunities in the UK, where further consolidation is likely to be discouraged by competition authorities. Davies, for one, dismisses any link between the share-price hike and long-standing rumours that Arriva is a bid target.

“I think consolidation is pretty much impossible for the majors as they all have between 15% and 20% of the market,” he argues.

And certainly Arriva’s growing strength in Europe makes it look less vulnerable, although it has yet to prove it can make real money there. It also needs more UK rail. Arriva was a late starter — it bought its first train interests in 2000 — and has only one long-term (15 years) rail franchise, Wales and Borders. It failed in bids for the Scotrail and Anglia franchises this year.