Alstom's Sion presses for deeper reset after market rout wipes a third off value

Paris, 28 April. Alstom's new chief executive Martin Sion is preparing the French rolling stock manufacturer for what he has described as a deeper operational reset, after a sharp market reaction wiped close to a third off the company's value earlier this month.

Shares in the Paris-listed group were trading around €16.30 on Monday, little changed since the 28 per cent slide on 17 April that followed the release of preliminary results for the 2025/26 financial year. The stock has more than halved from its 52-week high of €30.23, leaving it close to the lower end of analyst price targets ahead of full-year results on 13 May.

Sion, who succeeded Henri Poupart-Lafarge on 1 April after a decade-long tenure by his predecessor, joined Alstom from aerospace group ArianeGroup. He used his first analyst call to deliver an unusually frank assessment. "This is not the way I was expecting to start my mandate," he said, citing weak free cash flow generation and slower than expected production ramp-ups on new rolling stock platforms.

The group posted record order intake of around €28bn, taking the backlog to €100bn, but free cash flow fell to roughly €330m from €502m the year before. Adjusted EBIT margin came in at about 6 per cent, below earlier guidance. Alstom has formally withdrawn its three-year €1.5bn cumulative free cash flow target and conceded that the medium-term 8 to 10 per cent margin ambition will not be reached by 2026/27.

For 2026/27, Sion is guiding to organic sales growth of around 5 per cent and a margin recovery to 6.5 per cent. Goldman Sachs has kept its Sell rating; Kepler Cheuvreux this month moved to Hold from Reduce. A full action plan is expected later in the financial year.