In hindsight, you could say that when, two and a half years ago, Alison Jones agreed to become UK managing director and senior vice-president of PSA, then the group’s biggest job in this country, she walked into a revolving door.
True, there was a thorough and welcoming acclimatisation period during which she toured PSA’s factories and boardrooms getting to know people and procedures. But by the time she was back in the UK, Brexit upheaval was in full swing and the gigantic challenges of our dash to electrification were becoming urgent. A few months later came the Covid crisis, daddy of the lot.
Jones resolutely fought the challenges of last year using her trusted technique of empowering managing directors for each marque. It worked. Her safe hands were noted by big boss Carlos Tavares, famous for his forensic grasp of detail, so when FCA brands Fiat, Abarth, Jeep and Alfa Romeo were added to Peugeot, Citroën and DS to form the Stellantis UK, Jones was appointed MD of the whole lot, less Vauxhall. The move in effect doubled her responsibility. It has been a dizzying 30 months.
Despite everything, when I meet Jones at her Coventry HQ to discuss her Autocar Award-winning performance over the past year, she is calmness personified. She is friendly and open but wastes no hot air complaining about hard times, almost a business ritual in other quarters. Nor does she hold back from revealing that her mission as the new broom, defined with scary brevity by her immediate boss Maxime Picat, is “to drive results and deliver transformation”.
Jones’s LinkedIn entry says she is “known for fast delivery of ambitious results in a wide range of business situations”. Brexit, electrification and Covid might be exceptional, but as far as Jones is concerned, these are business situations. As she modestly makes clear, she was headhunted from her role as Volkswagen UK MD (after 21 years on a rising trajectory with the VW Group) because she had succeeded in a wide range of roles and circumstances. Tough challenges with big teams have proved her particular specialism, making her perfect for the Stellantis gig.
In such a large and disparate organisation, there’s lots at stake. In good times, the group’s UK car and van business generates a £7 billion turnover, takes about 15% of UK sales, employs 20,000 people and shifts more than 450,000 vehicles a year. Keeping all this intact requires courage and concentration, but so far the results have been okay, improving as Jones has become more familiar with the job.
When Covid struck, Jones started taking special measures to make the best of things, cut costs, reorganise and support people. As concerns about declining sales grew, it helped that PSA’s marques, whose models are already among the cleanest on the market, had avoided fines for excessive CO2 that have dogged other car makers since new regulations came into force 18 months ago. PSA has also been able to introduce new hybrid and EV models, better differentiated than ever. Of the three marques, DS remains a problem in the UK, but new models and measures will soon arrive.
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