A word from the President

For many years, I have liked to introduce myself using Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote, “Do not go where the path may lead, but go where there is no path and leave a trace .” The important thing to move forward is, above all, to know yourself well and be able to define your strengths and weaknesses, and perhaps in another blog, I will share my ideas on the subject of this long construction whose keywords remain “curiosity and learning from each day.”

At the beginning, you have to understand your deep motivations and what makes it so that every night something will wake you up and make you vibrate or awaken your interest to start a day with a smile and the thirst to move forward. For my part, several fundamental pillars build this spiritual nourishment :

• Mobility, bike, motorcycle, car without ever being able to define my favorite
• The desire to learn and endless curiosity with a self-taught approach
• Sport with running, cycling, triathlon, but also motor sports
• Innovation and a never-ending struggle against the “it’s not possible”
• An openness to the world that allows me to listen to my fellow human beings and often makes me say that I am a man of this planet and therefore “without a label”, that is to say “open, curious, eager to learn from others, without preconceptions”.

It was in the 90s that Brice (my partner at ULTIMA) and I were able to test our complicity and our shared vision of work through student projects that already required creativity, passion and commitment, with challenges already taken up in sport, in particular rather muscular bike rides. Then our professional projects took us away from each other without losing contact.

This period allowed me to lead numerous projects of creation, development, industrialization, turnaround or partnership and consequently to learn better and better my job as an entrepreneur through successes but also failures. It was between 2016 and 2017 that the sky cleared and the puzzle around my motivations began to take coherence. When you started working on your first cars in 1984 and 30 years later you realize that the path taken becomes a dead end, you deduce that mobility must change and bring different outcomes. This transition and this broader vision of mobility would find all its inspiration in a logic of counterpoint knowing that at the time I had access to all the data necessary to develop high-end cars that seemed to want to gradually resemble vans.

My aim is not to oppose SUVs and light mobility, but to make them complementary; to use my acquired expertise to serve a broader, more pressing objective, including the ecological transition and the need to rethink travel. Without going into economic magnitude, we note that many families have two vehicles and neither of them is really suited to the urban environment. It was therefore necessary to diversify the offer and bring different objects and also different modes of acquisition. Whether a person uses an SUV to travel from Lyon to Paris or go on vacation with three children, it makes perfect sense and for that there is no need to drive a hybrid with 500kg of batteries for nothing. But when you drive in the city and drive your child to school or activities, a scooter, a car without a license, a cargo van or a bicycle will do the job!

At that time, I had the chance to take part in the strategy in a large international group and to understand that the vehicles of the 2020s would increasingly look like Mega-SUVs and some even thought that a market of 100 Million vehicles could gradually become 100 Million SUVs with different levels of electrification, which seemed to me to be a mistake ! At the same time, I was participating in the construction of the strategic plan in my company and I was able to feed my thinking around “light is right” without convincing the board members to whom I was responding.

There's something magical about becoming a leader: you have to decide and take a step forward every day, finding a compromise between a long-term vision and day-to-day decisions that can sometimes introduce "noise" into your initial plan. But as my English friends like to say, "strategy is for breakfast and then there is a lot of noise."

Building a strategy and learning from our mistakes is what we business leaders must keep in mind and find a balance between experience, wisdom and risk-taking, surrounding ourselves with both experts and visionary, creative and agile people. In a very pragmatic way, I have kept several things from these past experiences that nourish my daily life :

• Protecting and developing our know-how with a delicate balance between localization and globalization
• “Costkiller” but not at all prices and not transforming our know-how into low-cost convenience
• Being convinced that a sum of small initiatives can ultimately give more strength to a sector or branch
• Do not develop in a single branch and know how to diversify your model in terms of product but also in terms of geography
• Implement a vision and a plan and not necessarily respond to the dashboards that your shareholders, bankers and investors brandish every morning with the risk of making the wrong decisions or putting yourself in a logic of “copying is winning” and anesthetizing your differentiating factors.

After this introduction, which allows you to better understand where I come from, I would like to come back to the ULTIMA project and this wonderful opportunity to be able to work on the mobility of tomorrow. Local mobility is undergoing a complete transformation, and many users are hesitant to take the plunge because traditional offers and solutions are not adapted to their needs.

When launching this project, we had decided in advance with Brice and Didier (my two partners in the ULTIMA project) that our first offer would be a “MULTIPATH” bike and it had to be designed to provide a breakthrough offer around three fundamental pillars :

1- Product innovation in the service of safety, modularity and customer comfort to facilitate its use
2- Technological innovation in the service of relocation with eco-responsible sourcing
3- Commercial innovation to enable us to offer the ideal object built to order, delivered within 21 days thanks to localization and production driven by orders thanks to our short supply chain and the support of our partners

First pillar

Did you know that 40% of French cyclists are stressed about taking their bike to work in the morning ?

Ultima has designed a bike that allows customers to have 100% of their concentration on the road and the environment in which they are riding.

The Multipath was designed to bring to the market all the innovations available to serve customer safety and comfort :

- An ebike weighing less than 20kg with its 630 Wh battery which gives it a range of up to 100 km

- A maneuverable bike and an open frame to allow everyone to handle it easily

- An automatic gearbox that makes driving easier and allows you to stay focused on the road

- Four levels of anti-theft with the classics (engraving and padlock) but also the GPS tracker and the possibility of disconnecting the transmission remotely to convert the bike into a balance bike

- The frame design allows it to be adapted to several people from the same family from 1.4m to 1.9m

- Modularity to order with 4 versions : city, trekking, cargo and cargo family

Second pillar

Innovation in the service of localization !

The strength of innovative technologies is to manufacture these components Made in Europe while remaining competitive with Asian competitors. Our injected carbon frame uses material that comes from recycling and will also be recyclable at the end of its life and this concept has been patented!

ULTIMA's strength lies in knowing how to work with different types of industrial partners, "big players" like Valeo and its MIF engine, small start-ups with innovative ideas but without the power and sufficient experience to industrialize them, or even historical automotive suppliers lacking activity with the capacity to support us in this new project.

Our ambition is to locate 90% of our components in France and 100% of our components in Europe, currently 98% in value and we will be at 100% by the start of 2023.

Next, we'll need to work with suppliers of suppliers to ensure that 80% of the value is sourced in Europe. "Made in EU" is extremely virtuous because it allows us to reduce our carbon footprint by 10 simply by comparing supply chains.

Third pillar

This last pillar was born from the optimization of the two previous pillars “a modular product a short supply chain” and it allows to produce bicycles on demand based on an ideal configuration made by the customer and to be delivered within 2 or 3 weeks.

Conclusions

As you have now understood, ULTIMA does not propose a revolution but rather a necessary evolution for this eco-system to help it remain competitive and European.

ULTIMA Mobility started production at the end of September and our first customers are happy to be able to benefit from all the virtues of our products and thus have more eco-responsible mobility.

All this would not have been possible without the help of a team that brings together many young and less young talents to enable us, within the framework of our own work or our associations with partners, to maintain a solid course between creativity and pragmatism in order to put our know-how at the service of tomorrow's technologies.