EuroBusinessMedia (EBM): Bureau Veritas, one of the world’s leading companies providing QHSE (quality, health, safety end environmental) testing and certification and management services, has just gone public. Franck Piedelièvre, welcome.
Franck Piedelièvre (FP): Thank you.
EBM: You are the CEO of Bureau Veritas, in a few words what is Bureau Veritas’s business and how is it positioned within its sector?
FP: Bureau Veritas is a leading organisation in conformity assessment services. What does it mean? It means that we are providing to our clients, inspection services, testing services certification services relating to their assets, to their products, eventually to their staff, in order for them to comply to rules, norms, standards. This is more and more important today for global organisations as well as local companies to comply with the rules which give them the license to operate. And we are there to give them assistance.
EBM: How is this business sector a growth opportunity for investors in the medium term?
FP: This is a business which has a lot of growth drivers. Just to name some of them:
global trade. Trade is expanding quite rapidly, almost twice the GDP’s expansion. We are of course a global organisation. As such we can facilitate the trade expansion as well as the safety of the trade expansion. We have also other tail winds, like for instance the development of regulations in the field of safety, environment, and hygiene for people working on sites. We are in a business which is also driven by outsourcing from companies. Companies have in-house testing or inspection services and they tend to outsource more and more to companies like Bureau Veritas. So we see more and more opportunities in this world. May I add that we see also a fantastic number of opportunities to consolidate our industry in many countries which have small local organisations which need to join an international leader.
EBM: Why did you decide to bring the company public and list its shares today?
FP: We think our organisation has reached a size, a need for recognition, which justifies the listing. BV, Bureau Veritas, is well known in France and in Europe, but globally the brand, which is so important, because the brand means recognition, means confidence, trust, needs to be the one which is really recognised all over the place. We think the listing should bring us this recognition. We think also that we need to win the talent race. Today there is a scarcity of engineers, technicians all over the place, in every country. To attract the best people, the best talents, we need to be visible, we need to be recognised and of course we need to hire more and more people that will become the BV ambassadors to our clients.
EBM: Now, typically a share listing or an initial public offering can help a company tap into pools of capital to finance its growth. What is your growth project today and would you say, as you referred to earlier, that it goes necessarily through a phase of external growth through acquisitions?
FP: We have always done acquisitions. We believed, since 12 years, that acquisitions were an integral part of our strategy. We have achieved 50 of them in the last ten years. Most of them have been successful - good integration, value for the shareholders. In the future we think this trend will accelerate - more opportunities to consolidate the market - and we’ll be, in our opinion, the consolidator of the industry. So we believe that being listed should bring us more resources, when needed, in order to really consolidate the market.
EBM: Now it’s noteworthy that your main shareholder Wendel is going to remain a 2/3rds shareholder after the IPO. Is the nature of your relationship or partnership with Wendel modified?
FP: Wendel is our partner since 12 years -- a very strong and a very good partner. We’ve got their assistance, their support in any circumstances. So we are very grateful to them. In the future we believe that they will continue to support us and we don’t believe any change of relationship should happen in the future. Of course we need to follow the rules of a public organisation, but other than that we’ll still be very linked and in a good relationship with them.
EBM: And finally, what is the financial outlook for 2007/2008 that you would wish to communicate to investors today who are discovering Bureau Veritas?
We’ve defined for ourselves a very ambitious plan. Between 2006 and 2011 we intend to double the size of our company, via organic growth as well as through acquisitions. In the meantime, we think that we can increase the profitability of our company, because in many, many countries and businesses which have been initiated a couple of years ago, who are not yet critical, so by expansion, by adding a portfolio of services, we believe we can increase profitability. So we will do. As a result of this, we believe that the bottom line should increase year on year in the next five years between 15 and 20% per annum. This is the target we have.
EBM: Franck Piedelièvre, CEO of Bureau Veritas, thank you very much.
FP: Thank you.
