Air Liquide chief Potier says France must change
An employee loads gas cylinders at the Air Liquide SA factory in Moissy Cramayel, France, on Monday, Feb. 13, 2012. Air Liquide SA will invest 40 million euros in a new air separation unit in South Africa after signing a long-term gas supply contract with Evraz Highveld Steel & Vanadium, the company said in an e-mailed statement. Photographer: Fabrice Dimier/Bloomberg©Bloomberg
A leading French industrialist has said that it is easier for French companies to do business outside the country than in France itself.
“French companies are doing very well outside of France, and that’s a very good example of what we can do,” said Benoît Potier, chief executive of Air Liquide, the French industrial gas group with a market capitalisation of €35bn. “So why don’t we invent in France the environment that we find in the rest of the world?”
Mr Potier was speaking to the Financial Times at a conference and exhibition in Paris designed to showcase France’s technological achievements. Among 200 stands displaying innovations from domestic robots to self-tattooing machines, Air Liquide exhibited a hydrogen-powered electric bicycle, and one of the two first hydrogen-powered cars registered in France.
Mr Potier said the key challenges he faced in doing business in France were the inflexibility of the labour market and the tax system. Although it was unfair, he added, to describe France as “the sick man of Europe”, “the problem of France is to find the way to be more dynamic, to grow, and to find the recipes for that”.
“We have to accept that France needs to change. We have to abandon the past and reinvent the future,” said Mr Potier, who also chairs the European Round Table of Industrialists, which groups together more than 50 chief executives and chairmen from multinationals active in the region.
He said companies in Europe faced too many constraints on doing business. In particular he said business needed a coherent approach by government to climate change and energy policy, and demanded a single digital market in Europe.
“This is going to be one of the key topics for the next five to 10 years,” he added.
In 2013 Air Liquide made just over half its €15.2bn revenues in Europe, and 23 per cent in both Asia and the Americas.
Mr Potier welcomed the recent announcement by Jean-Claude Juncker, the new European Commission president, of a €315bn three-year investment plan in Europe, but he said he was concerned about the lack of a strategic plan behind it.
“The issue with an investment plan is not the financing,” he said. “The financing normally comes second. If we as companies had to make a plan, we would not start by telling the board, this is how we’re going to finance [it].”
Mr Potier said infrastructure and education could be strategic priorities for the Juncker plan, which involves €21bn in guarantees provided by the European Investment Bank and the EU budget, to be used to raise private financing to invest in new projects.