François Jackow CEO of Air Liquide

0:29Hello, François, how are you? admired for a very long time and one of the finest companies, I think, in the world. So great pleasure to have you on. Well, thank you very much, Nicolai. Thank you for the opportunity. It's great to be here today. So my first question is a bit of a kind of a naive question. How is it possible to make money out of thin air? Well, that's maybe a part of the recipe of air liquid. You know, we are working with very simple molecules that we have not even invented ourselves. Somebody else did that a billion of years ago. So it's mostly working with oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, CO2, argon, xenon, air gases.

1:10But I think the key is to really focus on our business, not only on how to produce, extract those gases who have unique properties, but also to find ways for our customer to use them either for safety, for productivity, for health, many, many, many applications. But how do you, how many times can you split air into how many products? Well, I think basically you can extract, I mean, the main components. So the main one is nitrogen. Nitrogen is a great gas to inert, to avoid explosion, for example, in refinery, but also to protect any kind of oxidation in the food, for example, industry. They're using a lot of very pure nitrogen.

1:56but also when you are making semiconductors to make sure that the atmosphere is super pure. So that's the main one. But the other one, which is also unique, is oxygen, which oxygen is the gas, which is the gas of life because you're breathing oxygen. But it's also the gas of fire, which is helping combustion, welding, cutting, metal fabrication, but also oxidation to make a lot of stuff, which could be steel, glass, plastics. And then you've got smaller components, argon, for example, and you've got multiple rare gases, which are parts per million or parts per billion in the air. And those have also unique properties.

2:44Now, what is your personal favorite gas? My personal favorite gas? I think it's probably oxygen because, as I mentioned, oxygen is the gas of life. It's helped us to breathe. And unfortunately, I mean, we all have seen the importance of oxygen during the COVID time, where oxygen helped to save millions of lives. But also oxygen is the gas which is helping high temperature for, as I mentioned, the oxidation processes, but also cutting welding. So probably oxygen, which has been at the roots of air liquid, is one of my favorites. But today, more and more, we see also hydrogen, and hydrogen is becoming also clearly one of the favorites because hydrogen is a gas which today is used to make clean gasoline and diesel.

3:42It's used to remove sulfur from the petroleum. So it's very useful today in terms of environmental impact. But tomorrow, the big potential is in the energy transition to be able to use hydrogen as a clean energy vector. Yeah, and we will come back to that. Very important question. But in the meantime, not many people know that you are one of the best performing companies in Europe. You delivered some 12 % return over the last 10 years, which is kind of incredible in a market which has been difficult. So why are you so successful as a company? Well, I think maybe part of the recipe is that we manage to have a mix of resilience and growth capabilities.

4:26I think the resilience is based on the mix of our businesses, being in manufacturing, but being also in healthcare, for example. having a footprint which is a global footprint in the different geographies. But also the resilience comes from the business model where part of our activity, especially when we are dealing with the largest customer, when we build, own and operate a plant which is dedicated for a customer or for an industrial basin, we have long-term contracts with take-or-pays, with indexation for energy cost path-through, for example. And that business model is providing a very, very strong capability to perform in good, but also in more difficult times.

5:14So I think that's very important. On top of that, we are a growing company and we have been always growing. I mean, between 5 % and 7%, 8 % over the past 20, 30 years. I would like also to believe that the recipe comes from who we are. where if we think about our culture and our values, performance is something which is really deeply rooted in our DNA. Being a successful company for 120 years, I think we never are fully satisfied with the results. We always try to push the limit. We think long term. We want to innovate. We want to bring value through innovation. And I think that's very important.

6:02And that's part of the recipe for the long term and the long term performance. So if we dive in a bit to the contracts, because they are quite different from many other industries, right? So if I have a car company or a steel company or a brewery, you make a small little plant next to my plant, right? Yes. And then you put some pipes in and you deliver everything I need in terms of gases for a long period of time. So these contracts, how long are they typically for? Well, typically, I mean, for those large customers, there are 15 or 20-year contracts. What is very important is that we design ourselves the plant because we have our own engineering capabilities, which is part of the recipe.

6:43Because not only we design the plant, we build and we own and operate the plant, but we are feeding back the engineering and the technology team with the experience of an operator, which is making a huge difference between somebody who is just an engineering company or somebody who is just an operator. We have a full circle, basically, where we can improve the plants, the design, the performance based on the operation. And we have the technical capabilities to do that. And take or pay contracts means that I have to pay whether I need your gas or not, right? Long-term contract, I pay. Typically, you have an obligation to take part of the volume, which could be 70, 80, sometimes 100 % of the nameplate capacity of the unit.

7:33But what we are doing also, which is very important, is we are taking, of course, the full responsibility and the full risk for the investment and for the operation. So you kind of split the world in a way in so-called basins, isn't that right? There were areas where you have delivered to a lot of different companies and in a way control that area. Is that right? Yes, absolutely. I think one of the key strengths of air liquid is to be present in some key industrial basins where you have a high concentration of manufacturing industries, refining, chemical, steel industry. By being present there, we can oversize some of the units and supply multiple customers from a single plant or a series of plants.

8:18Then we build our own network in terms of pipelines that we own and operate ourselves. And we can optimize the production, which provides some benefit in terms of cost because of the economies of scales, but also provide a much increased reliability, which is absolutely key for our customer because those kinds of industry, refinery or steel plant can never stop. Do you split the world between you and your competitors then? No, absolutely not. I think the industrial gas industry for the very large plants are shared between a few competitors who have the technical capabilities to build this kind of units and to operate them.

9:00But we are competing everywhere in the world where, of course, it makes sense for each of us. So in some places, we are very strong. In others, it's more challenging. But no, it's a global competition for sure.

9:18Now, your gases go into all kinds of industries, semiconductors, frozen pizza, beer. I mean, hey, everything. What do you think is the most fascinating industry that you support? Well, I think, indeed, we are extremely fortunate to have a fascinating customer. And we are at the leading edge of the transformation and innovation of industry. Probably one of the most demanding customers are the customers in the semiconductor industry, in the fabs, because the fabs are becoming bigger and bigger and more and more advanced. And the level of purity which is required for our gases is just amazing. Here we are talking about level of impurity in nitrogen, for example, which is used in a fab at a level of one part per trillion.

10:11So really, really nothing in terms of impurity. And on top of that, you cannot stop because if you stop, it's tens of millions of dollars of damage that you can create to the full production line. So in terms of benchmarking and standard, that's probably the most demanding and fast moving industry. So here you deliver to the likes of NVIDIA, AMD and so on? Absolutely. I mean, we supply to many of the chip makers or the memory makers in the world, either the original maker or the foundries. That's good. Now, you also supply to the space exploration program. What do you do here? space is a very interesting area indeed and that's another application we have been involved in the space program in in europe since the 60s and the beginning of the arian rocket because when you look at the arian and since then we have worked on all the versions of arian basically what you see from the outside is a very large liquid hydrogen tank and a very large liquid oxygen tank so we were making those tanks and we were also supplying all the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

11:27So we continue to do that for the rocket and for the launch, of course, we are present there. But we have also other activities, for example, in the satellite, where for the satellites where you are doing earth observation, for example, you need to have some kind of infrared equipment, which required a very, very low temperature. Those are super sophisticated devices that we supply to some of those satellites. And what we see today is a renewed interest in space exploration. So it's very exciting for many of us because it's talking about helping to launch satellites with a very low carbon footprint to think about, I mean, alternative fuels, and hydrogen is one of them, to be able to reduce the carbon footprint of the space activity.

12:20But also, more and more, we have requests from customers to work with them to find ways to extend the life in space, for example, to have life supports, how you are going to breathe in space, how you are going to purify oxygen, how you are going to capture CO2, for example, in the shuttle in the space, but also how you are going to extract resources and use resources, manage waste, for example. So a lot of questions which are very interesting for the space exploration, but also which probably bring back to us some of the solutions that we can use already on Earth. Really, really fascinating. Now, you mentioned briefly hydrogen.

13:06What do you see your role being in the energy transition? Well, clearly in the energy transition, we see ourselves as being what we call a climate champion. We should be an enabler to help our customer to reduce their carbon footprint, to improve their energy efficiency. And we have many tools for that. And the thing is that we are in a position today to offer concrete solutions. If I take one example around oxygen, because we talk a lot about hydrogen, but oxygen can be also very helpful in the energy transition. If you use oxygen in an air combustion process, for example, when you are making glass, and when you are making glass, the first step is to basically have a furnace with a very hot temperature to melt the feedstock to make the glass.

14:03If you replace your gas, your oxygen, sorry, which is coming from air with pure oxygen, then the benefit is that you've got a much higher flame temperature. You've got a much better energy transfer in the furnace. And you can save between 15 % and 20 % of fuel in your process. So that's great because it's saving energy, but also it's reducing the carbon footprint because you're emitting less CO2. On top of that, because you don't have the nitrogen, you have replaced the nitrogen from air with pure oxygen, then the flue gas is highly concentrated in CO2 and you can capture the CO2 much more easily.

14:53So for the companies who want to capture CO2 outside of their process, it's much more economical to do so. So oxycombustion in the glass, but it's the same in aluminum, for example, recycling. It's a big market which is booming right now because, again, not only efficiency in terms of energy utilization and reduction of the bill, but reduction also of the carbon footprint. We see that industrial gases companies have high scope, one and two emissions. How should we as investors look at that? Well, I think we have indirect emission because we are using electricity to produce oxygen and nitrogen.

15:32And we have direct emission mostly because we produce hydrogen today from natural gas and fossil fuels. So if you just stop that and you look at the absolute value, then you may say, well, a company like Air Liquide has indeed 40 million tons of CO2 between scope one and scope two. So it's a lot. But I think what you need to do is to look at two things. First, how our gases and product and services are used by our customer. The example that I just mentioned on the glass industry shows that oxygen provides energy efficiency and help our customer to save on CO2. So there's a lot of environmental benefits by using our gases.

16:16Today, hydrogen, the main application is in refining to prevent the sulfur from being emitted during the combustion of the fuel because we remove the sulfur from hydrogen. So a very strong contribution in terms of environmental footprint. So that's clearly something to consider. I mean, the impact on what we do, which is positive for our customer. The second thing is that you need to look at the movie, not just the picture of what we are doing and how much we are emitting. We are completely committed to carbon neutrality. And on top of that, we have a clear roadmap to reduce by one third the absolute value, and we were the first in the industry to take that commitment, by 2035 in terms of scope one and scope two emission.

17:05And by 2025, we are going to see an inflection, a reduction, in the absolute value of our emission. We do that and that's part of the thing that we are committed to do to reduce our own emission, purchasing renewable electricity for example, capturing CO2 from our hydrogen plant or switching the hydrogen production from a fossil fuel based process to electricity using electrolyzer for example. There's been some discussion that the hydrogen that you produce may not be as green as as you claim. What are your comments to that? Well, I think we have been always very clear on the way we are producing hydrogen.

17:48And this, by the way, is being audited by third parties. So I don't think there is any misunderstanding on this. Most of the hydrogen that we are producing today is coming from natural gas. So it has a carbon footprint, for sure. But we are also the most advanced in converting the hydrogen production to reduce the carbon footprint. either on putting carbon capture on our own units. We are the only one today to have an industrial scale carbon capture unit in operation since 2015 in one of our plants to be able to capture the CO2. That's one. And we have many other projects for our existing units.

18:28And on top of that, we are the company which is operating the largest electrolyzer in the world in Canada, in Becancourt, which is 20 megawatts for a PEM unit. which is using electricity, low carbon electricity, because it's from hydro plants and producing hydrogen. And on top of that, we are going to scale that by a factor of 10, having three large projects in Europe, 200 megawatt each. So yes, today, in fact, we are emitting CO2 when we are producing hydrogen, but we have a clear roadmap to decarbonize the hydrogen production.

19:12Francois, I'd love to talk about the L-Iquid copper culture. Now, you've been breathing L-Iquid gas since you were born, right? You worked in L-Iquid the whole life. Absolutely. And I've been with L-Iquid for 30 years. That's amazing. What are the benefits of spending the whole life in one company? Well, I think there are many, many benefits. Clearly, the fact that I've been around quite a bit. in many countries. I've lived in several countries. I have been involved managing a lot of businesses. I know our teams. I know our customers. I've been through different times, sometimes a crisis, difficult ones.

19:58So I think this depth is for us extremely important and for myself extremely important. And I think it's giving me the opportunity to really understand our strengths, but also our weaknesses and to position ourselves currently at best. Because I think one of the very exciting things today is that we have more opportunities than ever. So we have to be in a position, and I think as a CEO, I have to position us to be in a position to seize those opportunities at best. Now, as a company, you don't hire much from the outside. What is the thinking here? well I think we do hire I mean people more than 10 ,000 every year basically but this is true that typically we don't hire so much mid-career people because we have a culture of developing people providing opportunities to work and to get experience in different parts of the world in different businesses we are I don't think working within silos.

21:06We give opportunities. You can be working in a technical field, then moving to commercial, then moving to HR, then moving to finance. So that's part of the DNA, which I think is creating a lot of, I would say, interest and excitement. As a result, I mean, people tend to stay longer with their liquid, more than 10 years on average, and many of them much, much longer. So mobility is something which is very important. It's also helping to build a network internally and, again, to know our businesses. I think the depth is very important. But it's not only, I mean, getting and moving in different functions because we value also very much the technical expertise and the depth.

21:55And we have identified already more than 20 years ago the kind of technical career ladder where we grow the people in their expertise to make sure that they can continue to grow, to learn, to develop themselves while keeping really a very strong focus on specific area, which is the only way for us to create value. I absolutely love this thinking, and we are working hard on it in this fund as well. So let's take you, for instance. What are the skill sets that you have acquired over the years in Aliquide? Well, I think the first one probably, I myself have more, I would say, technology background because I am a chemist.

22:35I studied in France and in the US. Then I did an MBA. But I really wanted to start with the commercial and business development function. And for me, it's one of the key elements in any personal development to be in front of the customer. I still do that all the time. Every week I meet several customers. I mean, it's important at every stages of your career. At the beginning, to listen to the customer, to be able to sell the benefit of the company and the value that we are creating. I think it's very important. As we go, it's also extremely important to continue to have this direct connection.

23:20I think for a CEO and for any leader, it's important to have this connection. It's also a humility experience because when a customer is not happy, he's going to tell you, whoever you are. And I think that's very important to get that connection. After I got experience in terms of more of technical aspects, I was in charge of innovation. I was in charge of some part of the engineering at some point. But I had also the opportunity to early on think in terms of strategy. In 1999, the top management of air liquid at that time asked me to work specifically for the general management on two topics.

24:08So 1999, one was CO2 and global warming. What does it mean for us? And the other one was hydrogen as an energy vector potential, what this could mean. So that helped me really, I mean, to think about that. And I don't know if I should say I've been fortunate, but I've been through several crises, which also as a leader is very important to be able to run a company when things are good and quote unquote easy. It's never really easy, but also in difficult times. What's the most important thing you can tell us about crisis management?

24:47Probably one of the crises which for me was a really challenging one was that I was the CEO of a Japanese operation in 2011 during the Fukushima crisis. So, I mean, first physically, when you are in the middle of this, the air liquid in Japan is quite a large subsidiary I mean you physically go through the earthquake and the tsunami and everything then you need to have to take care of your almost 4 ,000 employees that you have there and then suddenly a few hours after the beginning of the earthquake you've got a call from the plant manager of the Fukushima nuclear plant which is asking you to deliver nitrogen to the plant to inert some of the processes to prevent explosion.

25:38So what do you do? Do you send somebody there? I mean, in the middle of all the explosion and of what's going on. You have some of your employees which are volunteering to come there. So as a leader, you're really in a position where there is nothing written. There is no procedure. So you have to really make up your mind and decide by yourself. That's where I really had to go back to my inner values and decide what is right or what is wrong or what I should be doing. So what did you do? What did you do? In this case, well, basically in this case, in spite of the insistence of some of the employees to drive the truck there, I asked to make a deal with the army where we supplied the nitrogen 50 kilometers away from the plant, from the nuclear plant.

26:26And then they came and took the nitrogen, delivered that to the nuclear plant, and then came back because they were equipped to be close to the radiation. But that's just one example among, I mean, almost hundreds that I had to take for the past, for the few months during the crisis. And probably one of the things that I realized is that when you are leading a company, you are making decisions which impact the life of people. But very often you don't see that directly because it's kind of diluted in time. And if you take a right or the wrong decision, you will impact the life of people, but you will see that maybe a few years later.

27:04In that crisis, and that's very often the case in crisis, everything is basically compressed and you see the immediate impact of your action and you sense this responsibility. So for me, that was very important. And again, to use my own internal compass to make decisions and to connect the two, your personal life, your personal value, and then your professional life. And that's very important. I cannot say that because that's a drama for everybody in Japan. But this experience was really, for me, something which helped me to be clear on who I am and where I want to go. What are your most important personal values?

27:49Well, I think I'm probably pretty close to the values of Air Liquide. For me, there are two things which are very important. The first one is respect. Respect of people, which means respect of employees, respect of customers, respect of shareholders, of stakeholders. And that's really a fundamental value in everything you do. You have to put the people at the center of for who they are. That's one. The second one is performance. And, again, this is true for Aliquid, but this is true for myself. Tend to be never satisfied. wants to reach the limit. We are fortunate to have capabilities, resources.

28:33I think my duty for myself and for the people around me, for the organization, is to really help everybody around to fulfill their full potential and to go at the maximum of what they can do and they can achieve. And that's something which has never ended, but it's really a strong driver for me. But you should keep the two, respect and performance. So if I joined Ehrlich Eid, in what way would I feel that it's a French company? Well, probably if you listen to me, you'll get my French accent. But I'm not sure we are a French company. I mean, of course, we have a French headquarters and you are here in Paris.

29:18But I think we are truly a global company. with, I mean, French and European routes, for sure. But we are global and we are very local because our products do not travel. So everywhere we are, we are basically operating as a local company with, of course, I mean, the support of the group. But we are very, very local in what we are doing. And I think this mindset about being in many different places has been since the origin of Air Liquide. Remember that Air Liquide was created in 1902, and we were in Japan, I mentioned Japan just before, in 1907. And this is true for many, many of the countries.

30:00We have been very early on, because for us, we are, I think, pioneers. We like to think that we are, and really we want to push the envelope of where we are operating everywhere in the world. some French companies have quite a lot of hierarchy and you know quite a bit of power distance between the layers how do you see Elikid in that respect I don't believe that we are that way and I but maybe you should ask our team members I think we have a culture where we are strategically centralized but clearly we are decentralized in terms of empowerment and responsibilities. And that's very important. Myself, and I try to as much as possible walk the talk, I've got a really open door policy and I try to interact a lot with our team members everywhere in the organization and to have as much as possible direct interaction.

31:00So I don't believe that we are a super hierarchical company, but again, it's probably not for me to say that. Who is the CEO in the world you admire the most?

31:16That's a good question. I think there are CEOs that I think are quite amazing. Recently, I was talking to Guillaume Fori from Airbus, and I think he's doing an amazing job, and he's got a clear vision, so he's pretty good. And how do you learn? How do I learn? And that's a great question because I had this discussion this morning. I had a breakfast with a team of employees and I was insisting on the fact that curiosity and learning is absolutely key. I try to learn all the time. And that's part probably also of the answer to your question before about being with Air Liquide for 30 years. Because that's really part of the excitement of this company is that we are exposed to a lot of geographies, a lot of customers, a lot of trends which are really at the forefront of what is happening in the world.

32:11And I talk a lot with customers, with suppliers, with people from the different governments around the world. I read. I like to read very much. I visit plants, but also I try to see other things in arts, in other disciplines to keep me as aware as possible, not to restrict basically my vision, but try to expand. What do you read? What do I read? Well, you're French, so you probably read philosophy or something really difficult. No, sorry, maybe sometimes I do, but I probably have always a book that I'm reading. And the books that I like, I like very much biographies, for example. There is one that I like very much, which is Magellan by Stefan Sveig.

33:08So because it's about sailing, and I like personally to sail very much, it's about adventure. It's a good sport. Absolutely. A lot of fun and a good way also to see the world from a different angle. So the story of Magellan is just amazing in terms also of leadership skills, in terms of adventure, in terms of what he discovered. It's very well written. So I like things which are well written. So I like to read the biographies for sure. But currently I'm reading another one, which is the Engineers of Chaos from Dampoli, which is about social media and how social media are used and sometimes misused, especially by politicians.

34:01and it's a little bit an investigation in something which is for me a real danger for all of us which is those populist movement that we see all over the world

34:16when you look at your life what are the biggest setbacks you've had well um i think of course i mean we i had failures professional failures in some of the things that I wanted to achieve, probably. Contracts that I wanted to sign that I did not manage to convince the customers. Probably some setbacks about development and technology and market opening, clearly. So those are things that I try to reflect upon. We need to have the humility to accept that we are not perfect. And it's very often an opportunity to learn and to improve, hopefully to make better the next time. But for me, there are a lot of learnings from that.

35:12So what do you think is the key to overcome Zeplex? Well, when I think about what I've been doing in my career, I realized that at the beginning of my career, I spend a lot of time working and doing things professionally. Maybe I did not spend enough time with my family, with my wife, with my friends. And for me, it's to some extent a failure to be able to listen to my friends, my wife, my children, talking about that and trying to help me to overcome that is quite important. And that's something that does require some efforts because as we go, I mean, and we raise to the top. We have more and more people who are telling us that we are wonderful, that we are doing incredible things and it's perfect and so on and so forth.

36:00So we need to keep our ears open and make sure that we are ready to listen to this kind of feedback. And so who is telling you the truth and the gospel? Is that your wife? I think professionally I've got a few people that I trust who are telling me things that are really true feedback. And I appreciate that very much, the limited number of people. But I go and seek their feedback. And they feel comfortable enough to provide this kind of feedback. So I try to cultivate that because if you don't push for that, you will not get it. My wife, of course, but our children are great for that. so when I start to pitch about what we are doing in terms of sustainability of course they are probably a strong voice to challenge me on that and that's great and I like it very much so probably they help me a lot yeah no same here so we normally ask people at the end you know advice for young people we have tens of thousands of young people listening to this podcast What kind of advice would you give them?

37:14Well, I think probably the advice that we would give is make a difference. Really think about how you can contribute. And this could be in your neighbor. That could be in a large company. But I really push the younger generation to think in their inner resources what they can bring to this world. Because the world clearly needs them. And what I think is really sad and it's really discouraging is when I see the younger generation who don't want to fight, who don't want to bring progress to this world, who don't want to invent, who don't want to fight to get a better world. And I think we need the younger generation.

38:01We need to do our own share, but we need the younger generation to take their responsibility and to go and make a difference. well François you run an amazing company in a fantastic business and your values are coming through so clear so thank you so much for sharing all this with you and all the best of luck thank you very much Nicolai I enjoyed that thank you for the opportunity thank you bye bye