Engie’s new CEO sets out with the goal of simplifying the energy group
Catherine MacGregor must keep the French state onside while making the company more understandable for investors
Catherine MacGregor has worked beside roughnecks in the Gulf of Mexico and on oil rigs in Congo Brazzaville, but the task facing her as the new boss of French energy group Engie might be her most daunting yet.
An engineer by training who has spent much of her career outside France, Ms McGregor will in January become the only female leader of a CAC 40 company.
The year was meant to have gone differently for the 48-year-old. Ms MacGregor had been due to become chief executive of half of Franco-American oil services group TechnipFMC, which was due to separate into two companies.
She turned down a first approach by Engie’s headhunters in March.
But a plunging oil price and the coronavirus pandemic forced Technip to delay its split — and Ms MacGregor to rethink her plans. When she got the call again in August she said yes, and went into a short, intense round of interviews.
Ms MacGregor, who was born and brought up in Morocco, has long sought a CEO role.
In recent years she came close to the top jobs at pipemaker Vallourec, cabling company Nexans and Schlumberger, the oilfield services group where she spent 23 years.
At Engie, she was up against three main competitors: Gwénaëlle Avice-Huet, an internal candidate running its renewables business; Laurent Guillot, an executive at building materials group Saint Gobain; and Catherine Guillouard, who runs the Paris region transport system RATP.
Engie was under pressure from the French state, its largest shareholder, to appoint a woman. The finance ministry demanded more options after reviewing the short list in July, according to people familiar with the matter.
After the ousting of previous Engie CEO Isabelle Kocher in February, the CAC 40 was left without a single female boss — a glaring diversity problem for French President Emmanuel Macron.
Few people question Ms MacGregor’s credentials, even if she has yet to prove herself at a company the size of Engie, which boasts €60bn in annual revenue and employs 160,000 people worldwide.
The hope is that her time at Schlumberger, which moves promising executives rapidly between jobs and is something of a training ground for hard-working industrial bosses, will equip her to take the reins at one of Europe’s largest energy companies.
“One should not reduce Catherine MacGregor to someone who comes from the oil industry . . . She is someone who has major operational experience in complex environments and who has overcome all those challenges successfully,” said Engie chairman Jean-Pierre Clamadieu after her appointment.
A French citizen but to many still an outsider, Ms MacGregor, say advisers, wants to simplify Engie.
Ms Kocher, a former civil servant, wanted to reinvent the former state-owned gas monopoly by making it a green energy champion, with an emphasis on services.
Her push to sell off billions in fossil fuel assets led to her being ranked the world’s third-most powerful woman in business outside the US by Fortune magazine in 2017, but Engie’s stock price lagged rivals.
Ms MacGregor’s task is to make the group more understandable for investors. She will start by executing a new strategy led by Mr Clamadieu involving a pull back from services and asset sales in non-core sectors.
Going further, including overhauling management and putting in place her own strategy, will take months as Ms MacGregor gets to grips with the company.
She will also have to clearly delineate her role from that of her Mr Clamadieu, who has taken on a more visible and executive role since Ms Kocher’s departure.
Engie has been riven in the past by fights between chairman and CEO and is a company where the board plays a big role in shaping strategy. That will put pressure on Ms MacGregor to make her mark quickly.
However, “it’s not as if she took this job without talking to Clamadieu”, one Engie adviser said. “There is enough work to do in the coming months for both the chairman and the CEO . . . and Jean-Pierre has a network in Paris which she lacks and which will be valuable.”
A chunk of that work will involve maintaining a good relationship with the French state, which owns 23.6 per cent of the group and has outsized voting rights and three board seats.
Ms MacGregor has at least been spared one problem, the question of what Engie should do with its stake in water and waste group Suez. This month it sold the vast majority of its 32 per cent holding to Suez’s arch-rival Veolia, kicking off a nasty takeover fight but freeing up capital.
That sale was against the wishes of the government, a signal it might be less beholden to Paris in the future.
But Ms MacGregor, who has two daughters with her Scottish ex-husband, has moved back into her flat in the trendy 9th arrondissement of Paris and is unlikely to escape being drawn into the capital’s corporate and state nexus.
She recently read a biography of French president Charles de Gaulle, the founder of the Fifth Republic, with one person close to her archly suggesting that “it can’t hurt to have a bit more insight into how this country works”.