€14.7 million in revenue in 2025.
327,000 tires sold.
€8.5 million in losses.
Nearly €26 lost on every tire.
Yet Mobivia had the capital, the collection system, the distribution channels, and the Norauto, Midas, and Carter-Cash networks.
Then the group walked away.
Others chose to step in.
They are looking at the same machines, the same books, and the same risks.
But not from the same history.
For Mobivia, Black Star had become a succession of investments to justify, targets pushed back, and losses to contain.
A group also makes decisions under the scrutiny of those who will ask why it kept going.
The new owners arrive without that emotional liability.
They do not see €30 million sunk.
They see an industrial learning curve financed before they arrived.
Mobivia is deciding with the fatigue of someone who already believed.
The new owners with the energy of people convinced they can do better.
This is where the real risk begins.
To acquire a company abandoned by the shareholder best positioned to save it, you must believe the problem lay less in the asset than in how decisions were made around it.
That conviction is essential.
It can also become a superiority bias.
The new governance structure appears designed to contain that danger.
Cédric Meston carries the bet—and puts his reputation as a turnaround investor on the line.
But his conviction is not left alone at the controls.
Restructuring specialist Arnaud Hage becomes Chairman: his role is to keep strategic enthusiasm from turning into financial denial.
Adrien Eymard becomes CEO: his task is to turn investor intuition into industrial reality.
Former CEO Laurent Cabassu remains as an advisor: the knowledge stays, separated from decision-making power.
One believes.
One controls.
One executes.
The last transfers knowledge.
First decision: close Saint-Pierre-de-Bœuf and concentrate operations in Béthune.
Ninety-one jobs are preserved.
For the workforce, the new narrative must now survive the test of behavior.
Who shows up at the plant?
Who listens to the warnings?
Who owns the bad news?
Who makes the call when the numbers refuse to cooperate?
The turnaround will be decided as much by those answers as by production volumes.
Black Star pits two human responses to the same risk against each other: a group that no longer wanted to explain why it was staying, and new owners who will soon have to explain why they believed they were right.
They may have identified what Mobivia could no longer see.
They also enjoy the privilege of not having been disappointed yet.
A distressed company is not saved by those who believe in it the most.
It is saved by those who can recognize the moment facts begin to contradict their conviction—and then decide without protecting their ego, their narrative, or their reputation.
In a turnaround, conviction gets you in.
Only clear-eyed judgment keeps you there.
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