Nicolas Notebaert (Vinci Concessions) On se dit tout x Les Décideurs engagés

So I am 53 years old. I had grandparents who were modest but who strongly believed in education, education with the French model. So I have parents who were teachers who passed on this model of knowledge, particularly scientific truth but also school. And this relationship with knowledge, I also like competition, sports, meetings. And this combination of competition and knowledge allowed me, with the French educational system, the republican meritocracy as they say, to access the top scientific schools. And from these top schools, École Polytechnique, the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, that allowed me to carry out passionate work and activities in the service of transport infrastructure.

Absolutely. I started, and I am very proud of it, in the public sector. I did project management for motorways, I also worked in a ministerial cabinet with Jean-Claude Gayssot, who completed my background, which was rather scientific and technical, with a human approach. He was a great Minister of Transport. And from there, I made the choice in 2002, a little over 20 years ago, to join a rather astonishing group that had just been created in its name at the time, called the VINCI group. And it allowed me, based on my knowledge of transport infrastructure and the concession model, to develop, to bring to life, to make recognized the airport activity. And so in a group of this size, having the opportunity to develop a new activity, a new profession, to build a team, to recruit, to retain teams to achieve a common work because a work is never individual, it is a team effort. That is indeed what has driven me over the last 20 years.

Absolutely. First of all, VINCI is an astonishing group that is not always well known, where the group's values are very important for developing an economic and industrial activity. They are the values of decentralization and transparency. Decentralization is what allows everyone to give their best within a perimeter, a framework where they have autonomy and responsibility. Then transparency because the counterpart is that we must allow everyone to have access to what we do. So these group values of responsibility and autonomy have helped me a lot, and in any case I found myself in this group, I felt good, and I think I was able to give my best in this group. Then the personal values that I believe completed this absolutely incredible framework of the VINCI group are the spirit of competition. I find that competition, when it follows rules, when it follows the idea of collective challenge, is something that has driven me since childhood. But also to reconcile values of team, listening, working together. I am very proud, for example, that the very diverse teams that have joined me over the past twenty years, gradually especially over the last 10 years, are still there. There is great continuity, we grow together. And this collective loyalty to projects and to the people, the women and men who work together, I find that is a beautiful value. Finally, there is one last very important value that is both private and professional: I strongly believe in international relations, relations between men and women, culture, global geopolitics. And I am lucky to be in a fascinating profession; we participate in creating links between countries, between cultures, and that is absolutely great.

This is an absolutely fascinating subject. I am addressing young people in particular because I think it is one of the issues of the century and perhaps the most fascinating. There will be more and more planes in the future, so it is a double... In fact, mobility is not going to decline. Why? Because it is one of the great values of humanity for over a million years. The human species moves and it is unstoppable. At the local level, even if some would like to stop planes, for example, but that mode of transport is secondary compared to the irrepressible need for mobility. And at the same time, as the saying goes, we need to fight because it is the absolute urgency against climate change. So this reconciliation of what may appear as opposites is what motivates a company like ours. That is, how to allow mobility to continue but be sufficiently decarbonized at a high pace so that we can both move and fight climate change. So that goes back to your question: the first objective is that our own emissions, our infrastructure emissions, decrease. So we are very proud to be leaders in this area. We have been working on it for 7 years. We were awarded at COP28 in Dubai. We have four airports out of the ten awarded that were in our network. So we are very advanced in our ambitions, which are to forcefully reduce the carbon emissions of our infrastructure. And then the second step is how we help clients, vehicles. Absolutely. By the way, I believe there is an electric plane that you welcomed at Lyon airport, 100% electric. We also participated in the construction of this plane. Well, we facilitated its reception because we are not in the technology of aircraft manufacturing, but we have hangars, we have the costs related to use. We organized it so that it cost nothing for the plane because it is an electric plane and because in the logic of not only fighting climate change but also noise and environment, the surrounding municipalities of Bron participated in this interesting experiment. The electric plane is still very far off, of course. The electric plane will be limited to short-distance use. But we are also working a lot on what we call sustainable biofuels, that is, mixing biomass, residues of wood waste with kerosene. Today we can fly planes with only 50% kerosene. So we have made available at the airports of our networks, starting with Clermont-Ferrand, sustainable biofuels. Now we have them in about... After that, we need to be able to produce enough to replace fossil fuels. That will take some time, won't it? So there will be several stages. The first stage, which is well underway, is to use oily residues, especially all the waste oil from restaurants, and these are phenomenal quantities. That won't be enough. So after that there will be what is called in Anglo-Saxon terms 'alcohol to jet', and then in about ten years we will do what is called e-fuels, that is, synthetic fuels. But what is important to understand is that there is not one solution; every 5 or 10 years there is a solution to accelerate until the last one, which moreover will not be exclusive, which will be the liquid hydrogen plane that Airbus is working on for the 2035 horizon.

The concession model is a model that I find particularly modern, particularly relevant. Why? Because states today have many obligations. Recently they have had to very significantly strengthen their defense obligations, we see why, internal security, external security. They have health, education. And transport infrastructure is something that I think is relatively flexible and easy to concession. It gives the right to a company to build, maintain, operate and offer services to customers. And on that side, VINCI, which is the world leader in these activities, has demonstrated in Japan, Brazil, the United States that it is a global model that works well. The particularity of this model is that in fact, the money of companies in the service of the public can change destination. Before it was for construction, today we can use these revenues to maintain and also to decarbonize. The problem is that if this money can be used to decarbonize, well if you tax it, yes it offers less investment capacity. So this is a discourse that goes down well with most states. I think of the United States, which to decarbonize passed an act called the IRA, which basically tells companies: to help you decarbonize, we will give you tax breaks to encourage it. This means that it is not passed on to the individual's wallet. And so the environmental message also goes down better with users, I imagine.

The main issue or challenge is to reconcile the attractiveness of the territory. Mobility is a factor of territorial attractiveness, either long-distance connectivity or locally, so that the communities around the airport, around the motorway, around a high-speed line or photovoltaic panels live well with the presence of the infrastructure and benefit from it. And on the other side, that these infrastructures help fight climate change. This reconciliation of apparent opposites is a fascinating challenge for the concessionaires that we are, because at every investment decision, development of an infrastructure, we must find this balance between attractiveness, collective benefit to the populations of the territory because the infrastructure serves the territory and therefore its populations, and the limitation of effects on climate change. That is the main challenge. There are others. We are a global investor, so ensuring diversity of the teams working in these infrastructures, both international diversity, diversity of origins, diversity between men and women, urban and rural, having populations that represent the customers or the people for whom we work is very important. And so it is not just about ticking boxes of values; it is that in fact it is consubstantial to the activity. Being a French private concessionaire of public service infrastructure all over the world means that it is a business issue to have diverse teams with positive values of development of these territories. It allows us to better realize our project for these countries, these metropolises.

Yes, I think it has never been as important for several reasons. First, our customers, our passengers, are roughly half men and half women. So from the moment we represent and serve a population, we are all the more effective in serving them if the people who provide these services represent that population. We start from a base: we have acquired many concession companies in the world. Overall, our female staff is about 37%. We are not far off. So we have very diverse situations. There are countries where we have a bit less, and there are countries where we have parity. In France, we are rather at 45%, so that's not bad. And in the executive committees, we talk about managers. Managers are at 37%, so we have already reached a good level of representation of executives relative to the population. It is not enough at the level of what we call top management; we are rather at 25%. So I decided to take the lead. So we have a CODIR (executive committee) of VINCI Concessions that is parity, 50-50, with operational responsibilities as much as functional for women and men. And I ask all my company directors everywhere in the world to move towards parity. So we will catch up, we will pass, we will be above 37, we will go up to 50 for all concerned populations. And catching up in top management is important. So I think that people who say it's not possible, that's not the case. We demonstrate that it is possible, and especially it is possible everywhere in the world. One of the values of VINCI that we develop everywhere in the world through VINCI Concessions is that whatever the cultures and whatever the countries, it must not be negotiable. Because the gaps are also all the greater depending on the countries you are in. France is a rather good student, actually. France is a rather good student without being the best, but the important thing is that these values must not be negotiable. And the good news from the places where we operate is that we see that local teams take these values to heart, develop them locally, and achieve incredible results. Recently, we have a female airport director who for the first time is the head of the airport network in Latin America. We are proud at VINCI Airports that it is one of our female directors who was...

For about fifty years, but even before if we go back to the 19th century, the concession of public services and public works has allowed France to develop incredible infrastructure at the highest global level. This model has been exported by many international companies. Don't you think that at a time when the fight against climate change in mobility is probably the most important battle, this concession model could be better used to contribute to the decarbonization of mobility by allowing companies in the sector to invest in the decarbonization of mobility, both airport, motorway and rail, rather than taxing and organizing somewhat artificial communication vessels between these different activities?