Blowing hot air?

You can’t beat a bit of ambition to drive human performance. Most are content to potter along keeping the head down and nose clean, but every so often you get an outlier, like the first pharaoh who said: “Tombstones are for wimps. I’m going to get the slaves going on something a bit more impressive.”

There’s Alexander the Great blubbing because he had no more worlds to conquer; Napoleon rattling on about the field marshal’s baton in his knapsack; and Ludwig of Bavaria telling his architects not to hold back on Neuschwanstein.

Into this illustrious company we can now add Metair, which had been trundling along gently since it was formed in 1948, supplying components to automotive manufacturers without seeming to have any particular aim of kicking on towards global domination.

However, its recent interims suggest that the scale of its ambitions have ramped up a notch or two, and the company is now boldly stating that its five-year target is to become the world leader in mobility energy supply, with leading technology applications across all product ranges.

This is fighting talk, and it remains to be seen whether it is enough to put the usually self-confident Elon Musk off his stride. It is a field that has been attracting enormous levels of investment since Tesla announced its Gigafactory in Nevada, with China in particular piling in to increase its slice to 65% of a battery market that is predicted to double by 2021. The cynic might suggest that this might make Metair’s ambitions tricky to achieve, but hats off to them for trying.

It remains to be seen whether Metair’s fighting talk is enough to put the usually selfconfident Elon Musk off his stride