The head of Skis Rossignol de España, Enric Casas, is retiring in October at the age of 65, after 35 years with the company. Casas joined Rossignol in 1986 as an engineer and went on to become a technical manager. He was appointed managing director of the Spanish manufacturing subsidiary in 2006. The factory that the company established in 1972 at Artés, in central Catalonia, has so far produced a total of 19.5 million pairs of skis, 7.5 million of them under Casas’ leadership.
The man Casas calls his “natural” successor is Jordi Lladó, a 53-year-old engineer who has been with Rossignol since 1999. He will be taking charge at the beginning of October, continuing to pursue the policy set forth by the Ro ssignol Group’s new CEO, Vicent Wauters, shortly after his own appointment at the end of last year. The idea is to stick to “what is really essential”: namely, skiing, trail-running, trekking and mountain biking. Wauters sold off the Time cycling brand in February so as to emphasize Rossignol’s own brand of mountain bikes and e-bikes, established about three years ago. Rossignol’s streetwear and footwear, too, is to have a mountain theme.Hence the group’s new direction is to develop strong iconic mountain sports & lifestyle brands for 365 days a year.
This entails an indefinite postponement of the previously planned manufacture of pádel racquets at the Spanish facility. The first racquet collection manufactured at Artés, centered around the F550 model, was introduced by the company in July 2017. But racquet production ceased last year, Casas told CMDsport. For now pádel lies “a bit too far from the mountain world” – that is, too far outside the group’s strategy. According to Casas, however, all of the technical arguments peculiar to Skis Rossignol de España that favor racquet production remain valid. The problem is that the sport, while in definite expansion, has not yet achieved “critical mass.”
Last year’s factory runs were about 33 percent below capacity, producing no more than 400,000 pairs of skis because of the coronavirus pandemic. Alpine and mountain skis account for 70 percent of the factory’s production volume in normal years, with cross-country skis making up the balance. The factory at Artés, which is highly robotized, accounts for 75 percent of the Rossignol group’s overall ski production and all of its production of high-end cross-country skis. It has a potential daily run of about 3,100 pairs and employs about 380 at peak production. The remaining 25 percent is handled in France, where some 97 percent of the total production ends up, much of it for distribution around the world. Spain buys up only about 3 percent of the supply.
