Bombardier went from snowmobiles to subway cars to supersonic-speed business jets
Joseph-Armand Bombardier founded his company in Valcourt, Quebec, in 1942 to sell snowmobiles. Within decades it had become one of the world's largest makers of trains and aircraft. Then a single ambitious airliner programme nearly bankrupted it, and the company shed almost everything except the business jets it builds today.
Diversification began with a crisis. The energy shocks of the 1970s hurt snowmobile demand, so the company turned to rail, winning its first order in 1974 for trains on the Montreal Metro. In 1982 it landed a $663 million contract to build 825 cars for the New York City Subway. Its growth formula was to buy failing state-owned companies cheaply and turn them around: it paid C$120 million in 1986 for Canadair, which had just posted the largest corporate loss in Canadian history, then picked up Short Brothers, Learjet and de Havilland Canada. Turnover multiplied sixfold in six years at the end of the 1980s.
On rails, it became a global giant. It bought the assets of American railcar makers Budd and Pullman in 1987, led development of Amtrak's Acela Express trains under a $710 million contract in 1996, a project that ended in lawsuits, and in 2001 acquired Adtranz from DaimlerChrysler, becoming one of the world's biggest rolling stock manufacturers.
The CSeries airliner was the gamble that went wrong. Its costs pushed Bombardier to the edge of bankruptcy by 2015. Boeing complained that jets sold to Delta were priced below cost thanks to Canadian subsidies, and in 2017 the American government proposed a 219 percent tariff, which the International Trade Commission overturned in January 2018. By then the damage was done: in July 2018 Airbus took a 50.01 percent stake in the programme for one Canadian dollar, and the plane lives on as the Airbus A220.
Bombardier sold its turboprops, its regional CRJ jets and its aerostructures business, repositioning itself as a pure business aircraft company. It builds the Global and Challenger families, and in May 2021 a Global test aircraft pushed past Mach 1, a first for any business jet. With 138 deliveries in 2023, it was the world's leading business jet maker.
Source: Bombardier Inc.
