It’s a French group to extremely varied activities. CThis involves the concession of around ten regional airports to the design of factories, including gigafactories. The group Edeis is also present in energy renovation and animal food production. And, for three years, it has been working on the management of cultural sites such as the Nîmes arenas and the ancient theater of Orange.
Jean-Luc Schnoebelen, President of the Edeis group is the economic guest of franceinfo on Wednesday September 18.
franceinfo: Is there a coherence between all your activities or, deep down, is your driving force opportunity?
Jean-Luc Schnoebelen : There is a great deal of consistency. It is an engineering profession, but in the very essence of the name engineer, there is being ingenious. We tend to have forgotten that. And very ingenious is being able to respond to all kinds of problems and transform requests, dreams into reality.
You spent part of your career at Bouygues, which is why you also talk about being an engineer. A few years ago, you started managing historical and cultural monuments. Why did you get into this business and what do you think you bring to historical monuments that others don’t?
First, we started from a simple observation: we managed infrastructures, ports, airports and quite often, we were asked to increase traffic. This is a rather good sign, but we also had to attract people. And we realized that we are a country that is very rich culturally, with historical monuments, historical sites that are not exploited. And it started from this principle, it was to say if we can motivate people, to make them come to a historical site, we will create a flow of passengers, a flow of people who will spend money around the city or around the territory.
So you contribute to the attractiveness of the areas you serve, whose infrastructure you manage.
Absolutely. We claim to be the ally of the territory. And, I would say, that we are a bit of a hypochondriac country. We still have illnesses, but there are plenty of opportunities, things to develop. And we realize that by using, for example, the Nîmes arenas where we put on shows, we are attracting as many people as the ferias a few years ago.
Indeed, it is a success. The Cité de la mer in Cherbourg welcomed 125,000 visitors this summer. But at the same time, there is also some criticism sometimes about the choice of shows, of the promotion of historical sites considered a little flashy. How do you respond to this criticism?
We did a show at the Cité de la Mer, indeed, an electro festival. First, there were a lot of people who came, we filled the room for the first concert, there were 5,000 people. People discovered the Cité de la Mer and they said: “But we didn’t know the place and we’re going to come back to visit”. So, in fact, there are a lot of places that are little known and to have shows where there are… more people…
More mainstream? You don’t mean popular, but actually, that’s kind of what you mean.
If you want, yes, popular. And I would go a little further: we systematically try on all our sites to attract children and teenagers. Why children and teenagers? I think we missed something culturally on teenagers since they don’t want to go to a museum. For them, it’s off-putting, it’s boring. So we considered that we needed to get young people back to historical sites by using new methods, new techniques.
Even if not everyone is happy. It also brings money into the coffers. That is also part of what you offer when you win the calls for tenders, the fact that everyone wins in the end, especially the city or the community.
Of course, it’s a win-win situation, it means that we are giving back…
That’s why you’re a businessman. Managing seaports, historic sites, airports. The public today can’t do it all alone. We need to increase public-private partnerships. Basically, you’re the perfect example of the fact that we need to turn to the private sector today, when we see the drift of public finances, particularly local public finances.
We are a solution. The first thing we have compared to the administration is that we have a much greater reactivity. We can decide during the day to modify something, to invest, to disinvest, to bring in the public, which is very complicated for the public.
Aren’t you also showing that the public today no longer knows how to do certain things?
I think they know how to do it. But we have imposed so many administrative, fiscal and social constraints on ourselves that we can no longer do it effectively. But they have the capacity to do it, that is to say that we have created our own obstacles.
So, it’s not a question of know-how, it’s a question of money, of responsiveness…
Money, responsiveness… I’ll take an example that’s a little different. I’d like us to understand. Today, we’re talking about health problems. When you decide to build a hospital, you put 20 years between the time of the decision and the time it’s received. There’s an example that I can remind you of. Jacques Chirac who announced the Georges Pompidou hospital as being the most modern future hospital there is. It took 20 years to build it. When it was finished, it was obsolete. That means that we ignored human intelligence and the technical evolution of everything that was being done in medicine, outpatient care, the rise of outpatient care.
Is that why we have to resort to the private sector, so that things go faster?
Use the private sector and then remove a certain number of obstacles.
And in particular financial obstacles?
Not just financial obstacles, including administrative ones.
During this tremendous development of Edeis, you remained alone in charge. Today, you are opening up your capital. Do you intend to hand over the reins?
I don’t agree at all. I think that here too, to reassure, there needs to be continuity at the shareholder level, at the management level.
Because it’s you, basically. You’re not alone, but…
No, there is a big team that works a lot. So yes, I am the figurehead, but there is a whole team that works in the same spirit of being ingenious, of bringing solutions. And we wanted to strengthen ourselves with capital that is longer since originally, we had started with venture capital whose lifespans are a few years, five, six years. And then we will have to change, find someone else. And there, we said, we find someone who has the same philosophy as us. That’s why we changed. So there is absolutely no question of leaving.