BFM Business and La Tribune present the 1819 of Edv Chevrillon. You are in the 18 19, he put 8.5 billion on the table to participate in the buyout of SFR alongside Orange and Free. Good evening Olivier Roussat.
Thank you for being here. You are the CEO of BIG. BIG which therefore gets the largest piece of SFR. It's about 40% that you have.
Yes, I was saying about 42% effectively about 40%. You are the numbers man. I have, you are right about 40%.
We will go into a bit more detail because I think it's the first time you are speaking, at least in an audiovisual medium. You gave an interview to Les Echos and there are still many questions. There is the question of the competition authority which will be somewhat decisive. And then there is the question of who benefits from the crime, so to speak. That is, will it benefit your shareholders? Will it benefit the employees? Will it benefit us consumers or businesses? First, what exactly are you buying?
So in the perimeter that we are taking over from SFR, and it was quite long discussions with the other two members of the consortium, we are taking over the enterprise activity, what we call B2B. We are taking over part of SFR's activity, the SFR customer base, those who have the red square, whether on the fixed or mobile side. And we are taking over the MVNO activity, a particular MVNO called Prixel. Okay. And so we are especially taking over, when I say especially, it's something important for us, we are buying the piece of network that we shared with SFR to regain control over the entire network we use.
Okay. And that's where the competition authority might ask you to make concessions. But we will come to that, you are also taking over stores, 150 stores.
So there is the store network of SFR. It's 150 that you are taking over. In total, we have committed to each take over a certain number of stores to ensure continuity of service and offer a job opportunity to the employees there. A job opportunity, meaning being able to take over the employees inside and then make proposals for all employees of SFR distribution. And we are taking over overall the various infrastructures they have, currently all their technical infrastructures, and that is mostly B Telecom which...
Yes. In fact, when we said you were taking the largest piece, it is indeed true. The stores, we will get straight to the heart of the matter. The stores, are you keeping all of them or not?
No, the stores, the proposal we made is that you have a very simple problem in the stores. You have stores that are sometimes next to each other and for a certain number of store contracts, you need to guarantee that when you have an associated club, for example, you guarantee that there is no store of the same brand within 500 or 600 meters. So if you find yourself with a store right next door, it's not possible. You have to separate the physical part of the stores from the employee part of the stores. The physical part of the stores is to each take over 40 stores.
Yeah. Each 40 stores. That means that the SFR brand will disappear for you.
So the SFR brand will remain present in the databases. It will not be used from a commercial point of view, but during the migration time, one of the important things in this project is that the migration duration we announced is a migration period that extends over 30 months. Yes, you have to understand. The first step lasts 18 months, it's the antitrust phase. For 18 months, nothing happens. After 18 months, if we have the authorization to do the deal, a new period of 30 months opens, which is the migration period. And during this entire period, you take the customers from the SFR base and place them either with Orange, Iliad, or with us. And during this entire period, the brand continues to exist for customers. However, we do not use it from a commercial point of view.
Okay. OK. But it's long. It's very very long.
No, it's very long because it's big. The number of customers to migrate is significant. And what you need to understand is that operators try to migrate while minimizing inconvenience for the customer. That is, we try to do as many things as possible that are called over-the-air, meaning we directly download to their mobile, we change it very seamlessly to avoid the customer being bothered by the change of operator.
But for example, SFR Business, which is a big part of SFR, becomes Big Telecom Business.
The SFR Business brand, we will take it over and gradually, as contracts are renegotiated, it will effectively become B Telecom Enterprise.
Okay. Tell Enterprise, finally the business part, it will no longer be done in the long term, so in 2034 because the process is long.
This long process, if we imagine that we have, let's take a simple case, imagine that the competition authority, I'm taking simple rules, gives us authorization on January 1, 2028, we have 30 months of migration, that pushes us to mid, that pushes us to June 2030. At that point, normally you have succeeded in renaming everything by 2030, there will be no more SFR, no more brand with you.
What commitment are you ready to make for employment to reassure SFR employees? Because I received the CFDT delegate, knowing that the social process is already starting.
So there is something, there are really two completely different timelines. There are two things that are not very well known. The first very short-term issue is all the employees who will be in the stores because we can reasonably understand that if the brand disappears, fewer people come to the stores. For the rest, our problem is not so much, well, our problem is to keep the employees. Clearly during the 30 months of migration, we need to run the operator and the employees must stay. That is, concretely, our problem is first and foremost a retention problem. We, all employees of BU Telecom of SFR Business automatically transfer to Bouygues Telecom from day one since we buy the activity as soon as we have antitrust authorization, once again. And then for the rest, you have a company that will be the company that carries out the migration of customers to the target operators. This company lasts 30 months and we need the employees to stay in this company. Our problem will be a retention problem. It will not be a departure problem.
But that is, I mean, it's on the side of SFR, you are asking them to manage that.
That means that from the moment the antitrust gives us authorization, if we get it, we need to put in place plans that guarantee that people stay. Not that people leave, that people stay. It's retention. Well, it's retention plans that you have to implement to ensure they stay. If they leave, you can't run this company that you need for 30 months, and then afterwards you gradually dispatch them.
So we see that for you, you are buying the largest piece, it's 8.5 billion on the table. Do you position yourself as a direct competitor of Orange? We remember that at the time, Martin Bouygues wanted to buy, well, a part of Orange, actually become the reference shareholder of Orange. He was blocked notably by the current President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. Is this a bit of revenge? The tit for tat? What is it? Telecom is a fixed-cost industry. The more customers you have, the more ability you have to generate resources that allow you to invest and therefore capture customers and continue to grow.
There, the number of customers we inject into this fixed-cost industry, our network effectively allows us to become a significant number 2. And so once you are a significant number 2, it allows you to say, if I am number 2, I will seek to reduce the gap with number 1. It's quite natural.
Yeah. Is this consolidation in telecom? I want to remind that the starting signal was given right here by Benoît Cœuré, the president of the competition authority who was on this set and said if they come with a project, we will look at it. In any case, we are no longer closed. We clearly see an evolution in competition policy at the European and French levels. For you, it will be at the French level that the case will be studied.
So in fact, you have to understand that in this operation we have three notifications to the competition.
You have the notification from Iliad which is done in Europe. You have the notification from Orange which is done in France. The notification from Bouygues Telecom which is done in France. You have two cases in France, one case in Brussels. It depends on the turnover, the percentage of turnover, 70% of turnover exactly. France. So you either have the ability to put all cases in France, or to put all the instruction of the competition authority in Brussels. It's one or the other. It's something that is not decided. It's not something with a very automatic character. There is something you need to keep in mind. The rule of law that applies in competition law is exactly the same in Brussels and in Paris.
The same. You don't have different treatment depending on whether you are in Brussels or in Paris.
What concession are you ready to make to seduce the competition? We know that first you are a regular, we'll say a word about it later because when there was the M6 TF1 case, you had made, yes, you don't always win. You learned something since, but above all you made big concessions to the point where they asked you almost not to buy M6, you said enough. But now, how far are you willing to go? Networks to investors?
Cases where the logic of the competition authority is to ensure that with the number of remaining actors, the certainty that competition is animated, and therefore there must be conditions to allow what it calls a maverick to emerge, someone who animates the market. And so the entire competition authority's sole objective in its instruction, which lasts almost 18 months, is: what constraint do I give you to guarantee that the market remains animated? And so precisely, you have to ask that.
Accurately, Anthony Velan to try to see what they will ask us, but that's what will happen. That is, their objective is really your opinion, where will it position itself? Do you see it on infrastructures, on pylons, on networks?
You probably have obligations. If you look at what happened in England with Ofcom, Ofcom asked operators for investment commitments to cover even more territory. They can ask you for investments to have more resilience. They can ask you, in short, they have what is called all the efficiency that we can provide, which typically must be discussed in a recent interview. Very clearly, it is the authority that will create the conditions that guarantee that things are done for the benefit of the consumer, because the authority's logic is that.
Yes, because he said in an interview with our colleagues at Le Monde, he said it's not an operation that goes without saying.
It doesn't go without saying. Yes.
Yes, it doesn't go without saying. I see you know it by heart. You noted it.
Is it every word? But the words, we do exegesis of the text.
Yes, but the words are quite strong. Nevertheless.
It doesn't go without saying. Well, no, I think there is a path but it's not guaranteed. So now, we are more optimistic than pessimistic. I think we have more chance of succeeding than failing. But nothing is written. So it's all the work we will do to reassure the authority, to guarantee that we are well able to maintain competition in France.
That's its objective. So maintaining competition for a simple reason, to maintain prices and investments because you said it, consolidation is your strong argument as an operator, to say it will allow us to invest, but you could already do that, and now the question is the price for consumers and businesses.
Precisely in the commitments, in the mechanism that the competition implements, antitrust, sorry, it's really to ensure that precisely what it imagines produces prices that remain dynamic for customers.
But what could it be? Give us an example. What could it be?
Oh listen, we'll let them make us proposals because I think we especially shouldn't give them ideas.
No, no, no, they have ideas, they don't need us, I'm not worried.
Yeah. No, because there will inevitably be a rise. The time, your synergies, there will be no rise until 2024.
As long as you run to be able to double the one in front of you, it makes you dynamic and forces you to be imaginative and to really play on competition. That's what we've been doing for quite a few years now and that's what we'll continue to do, and I think Iliad on its side will do at least the equivalent. I have no doubt.
He has a strategy that is more international. He is developing a lot in Poland in particular. But you say, you need a maverick. Are you the maverick, Olivier Roussat? The maverick, you need a maverick in mobile, you need a maverick in fixed. If you look at the state of the market, the one who animates the fixed market the most is clearly Bouygues Telecom for many years now. We need to continue to grow and we will continue to grow. Until now, you had a maverick in mobile, it was rather Iliad and apparently, it plans to continue to be. So it seems to me that we have mavericks. So you are rather in fixed.
Our objective is to be able to continue to grow in the French market. Yeah.
It is to be able to develop in the enterprise market. It is a market that is quite unbalanced, in which you still have a very large share held by Orange. And so there, we have real room to go and recover, to grow and recover a customer base. It's taking advantage of what SFR brings us through everything it does in what is called ICT, that is, all these network service and connectivity operations other than connectivity on things that are interesting, things that companies use more and more. Everything related to cybersecurity, all these related subjects on which we have a real opportunity to develop more because SFR was much better than us in this area.
Is it for you, and much better than us because it is still there for 18 months?
Yes, but that's where we wonder what can become of a company that knows it will be wiped off the map for 2 or 3 years, you see, until the agreement. The discussion we had on TF1 M6 lasted 15 months.
Yeah. No, that's true. Good answer.
OK. So for you, the synergies, you estimated them at how much?
Well, what we said is that the part, what we considered as the level of synergy we were able to deploy from, from memory, I think we must have said that from 2032, it's something close to a billion euros realized. So it's something significant.
