Interview with the CEO of Citroën, Vincent Cobée.
Health crisis, flea crisis and now humanitarian and security crisis; the automotive sector has been under severe strain lately.
“In the two and a half years that I was lucky enough to be at the helm of Citroën, we have lived through a pandemic, an electronic components crisis and now a war. The current situation in Ukraine is a human crisis, humanitarian, social well before being an economic crisis; it is necessary to know how to put the stakes at the right level. It is obvious that this crisis has very strong secondary impacts such as the increase in a certain number of raw materials and a resumption of interest rates caused by high inflation. As unfortunate as it may be, chaos will be the only fairly stable norm for years to come. As an economic player, you have to adapt to this very high volatility and develop managerial agility, operational resilience and total pragmatism in the face of these crises. The difficulty is that no one is able to predict what will happen in the next three months when we are an industry where we s develop vehicles over several years and that we invest in factories with a horizon of 30 years.”
