Humility may not appear to be the strongest suit of Tufan Erginbilgic. But when the Rolls-Royce chief executive recently indicated that the goal of Britain’s engineering champion is to become the largest company on the London Stock Exchange, there were some, while respecting the ambition, who were a little aghast at his temerity.
The exponential rise in the share price of Rolls-Royce since Erginbilgic took over in early 2023 — an extraordinary 12-fold increase, though admittedly from a bombed-out base — has already seen it cruise past his old company BP as well as the defence giant BAE Systems. Since his comments, Rolls-Royce has become the fifth-largest stock in the FTSE 100, with British American Tobacco already in the rear-view mirror and Unilever just ahead.
Even so, to leapfrog HSBC and AstraZeneca he will still need to turbocharge the current £98 billion market capitalisation of Rolls-Royce to get within touching distance of the market leaders’ £170 billion-plus valuations.
Just when some were thinking about calling time on Rolls-Royce’s stratospheric rise, it has caught another zephyr with reports that Boeing is in talks with the Derby-based enginemaker to use its next-generation UltraFan technology on the American manufacturer’s future replacement of the 737 narrowbody aircraft type.
