Michel Rollier, one of two managing partners of the Michelin tire company, has assumed the duties of fellow partner Edouard Michelin, who died Friday, May 26 in a boating accident off the coast of the French peninsula of Brittany. He was 42 years old.
“Our strategic orientations are clear,” Rollier said in a statement after the accident. “They remain unchanged.”
Based in France, the company has 130,000 employees worldwide and is a major name in maps and travel guides as well as tires.
An engineer by training, Edouard Michelin began work in the family business making tires on an assembly line. Later he spent three years as chief executive of North American operations. He was a great-grandson of Edouard Michelin, who founded the company with his brother, Andre, in 1889.
