We are Christians, we are Hispanics, and we are gentlemen who believe in private property. I am Catholic, I am Basque, and therefore I am Spanish. Doing good means fighting every day or trying to evangelize by our example. Applying these humanist values that come from Christianity, if you know how to manage them well, is profitable. Innovation comes from the generosity to share ideas and the humility to let the person opposite you improve them. And that human interaction is what makes better companies. I believe that the Christian leader fulfills himself and fulfills the company when he leads it according to his values. God doesn't always take the trouble to speak to you. You think that no, it's not working for you, but it does work.
Hispanidad turns 30 years old. We wanted to celebrate it in a somewhat original way. We are an economic newspaper and at the same time a newspaper with a Christian ideology, and we have never hidden it. So we want to relate both things. To do so, we do it with different business managers. What does the Christian faith have to do with business management? I have with me Josu Imaz, CEO of Repsol, a man that we journalists like very much because he never says anything just to say it. Everything he says must be noted, especially when he speaks in public, and because after a few years of settling in and such, he has been a kind of crusader against exaggerations, I said, exaggerations of climate change, against the exaggerators of climate change. But well, what I want to talk about with him is the question with which I always start these interviews: What relationship does your Christian convictions have with your business management, in this case as CEO of the country's largest oil company?
Well, first of all, I feel a bit embarrassed to talk about this because obviously Christian convictions belong to the personal sphere, right? They are linked to faith, to believing, to a series of things that are part of, let's say, one's own beliefs. But it is true that I believe that Christianity is much more than that. They are also values, but humanist values, they are values of putting the person at the center of the economy and economic decisions, which [sigh] there are people who share, evidently, these values that we call humanist, and possibly the root of these values does not come from Christianity for them, it comes from other areas, let's say, humanist, right? I, perhaps due to my own experience, youth, readings in my youthful days, always followed with great pleasure the importance of the person in the economy, the concept of the common good, the concept that the economy and the company are instruments that also serve society and the person. And I believe that these values, this approach, has been, in my case, in a way, let's say, perhaps perceptible, but sometimes involuntary, because one can separate their personal convictions from their way of acting in life with people or in organizations, right?
Have those convictions ever clashed, for example, putting the person at the center with your business activity? What happens when expenses skyrocket above income and you have to cut them, affecting people? Anything else.
Life is about managing contradictions, huh? And there are those who often talk about the contradiction, the CEO paradox, and I think it can be applied to many other areas of life. Well, in the end, it is very easy to deliver good results in the short term. Everyone can do it at the cost of destroying the future of the company. That is, let's say, the maximization of profits in the short term. It is also very easy to bet on the long term of a company, but they measure you every quarter, and if in each quarter you don't meet a minimum, then obviously you don't reach the long term because you've been fired along the way. I think the difficulty, the contradiction of the paradox is managing the short term because one has to satisfy the people who invest in the company, give them a return, but at the same time preserve a long-term project so that the people who are entering today, in this case at Repsol, have a future. And of course there are moments when one lives this contradiction. Let me give an example. For example, the pandemic, in April 2020 we had no revenue. No cars were on the roads, no planes. We lost, I recall, 96% to 97% of kerosene consumption. Only the planes bringing masks from China and some military planes were flying, no one else. And we made a decision: we decided to keep 3,400 service stations open and keep the five refineries fully operational, losing money in a way that is public today, but because we understood that we had to be an essential service for the country and that the ambulances, trucks, transporters carrying products to the supermarket had to have minimum services. And we could have said, 'No, we'll keep 300 service stations open.' No, we kept all 3,400, and there were some days we had to close one or two due to infections because we didn't have staff, but these are moments when you say, we have to bet on service, we have to bet on the future, we have to bet on our people, and there will be moments when we have perhaps failed, I don't deny it, and well, managing that contradiction is sometimes difficult, but I believe that balance is absolutely necessary.
