Good morning, Business, the big interview. 8:19 AM on BFM Business and on RMC. Discover our guest this morning with Raphael Leand, it's Enrique Martinez. Hello, you are the CEO of Fnac Darty. We are going to talk about this Unieuro deal that you have just closed. You have taken over an Italian group that does 249 million euros. We will talk about your positioning, especially in Southern Europe. But before that, France and our domestic consumption. You published your results in mid-October. What we see is that we are stalling in France. We no longer have the dynamism that the Southern European countries have. Yeah, actually, hello everyone. We have, we believe, we don't believe, we don't disbelieve either. Could we have imagined with all these contexts a bit gloomy and a bit negative?
But it's true that consumption follows the French macroeconomy a bit. It's the growth of industry which is in real difficulty. On the other hand, in Southern countries, Spain, Portugal, the economic recovery has been much stronger, much more household confidence. And we had a good start, but it's not that households are richer than French households. That is, the relationship to consumption is not the same. No, and when we look at the inflation-wage pair in France, we are not very behind what has been done in other countries. Spain, for example, they caught up wages much later and much less, in a slightly less powerful way. And savings have decreased, not increased. There are elements in France on growth, especially on real estate markets, that weigh on many sectors and industries. Other countries don't have these phenomena. In fact, in France, we find ourselves with all the phenomena at the same time: confidence, growth, investment, which have not aligned at all. And so there we are, we need to find another way with a different economy, a different growth, a more responsible growth. We are part of these phenomena, but we need to find growth to finance future investments, which are very necessary.
That's interesting. You published, Enrique Martinez, in the spring a book titled 'And If We Consumed Better' from Editions de l'Observatoire. It's a bit the... you decided to focus on repair, a more sober consumption. You cite Pierre Rabhi, for example, in this book. Isn't it a bit hypocritical when you are a retailer like Fnac Darty to embrace happy sobriety? Or what do you think?
That a retailer... a retailer is not simply always more, normal logic, at best, at best, differently. And it's been a long time since we developed a service branch that is increasingly powerful, for which we invest, we create talent, we invest in capacity, we create a model that allows low-cost repair. And today, 2.5 million interventions per year and a DartyMax subscription that has exceeded one million subscribers. You are the first repairer in France. Yeah, I would say almost one of the biggest in the world, because these professions... the repair professions today, they don't interest many people. Because you can imagine, it takes thousands of people for an activity that has low margins and high costs. We do it because we believe in it. These integrated service models of repair in the service of our clients. We have more than 15,000 subscribers by the end of the year on these DartyMax plans. It's not the most profitable activity. Is it profitable? Because if it's not profitable, it's not viable in the long term. It's... if we weren't profitable, we are a public company, so our activities... philanthropy is not philanthropy. It must be a model that is very interesting for consumers. Because otherwise, the consumer today is very agile, very, very, very quick to change platforms, but finds a certain profitability to finance investments. We have trained hundreds of thousands of people in these professions. We have made massive investments, so we will capitalize on that in the future.
And you are betting on customer loyalty, right? Behind that, you are launching, so that people believe that repairing works, that we can buy second-hand, a digital passport so that there is more trust in repair.
Yeah, three barriers to repair: one is prices, two is technical skills, and three is trust. So the more you have these factors eliminated, the more consumers will be led to repair and resell these products. And we thought that to follow the life of a product, we give it a digital passport, it's a QR code that we have already started to put in products. Which were functional in the Olympic villages, which we recovered, recycled, and sell today. Well, it will allow that when you want to buy these products in 5 years, we will give you information on how these products were treated. I know it's like a maintenance logbook, like for a car, we have the repair history. Today with blockchain, all that is much simpler, decentralized, it belongs only to us, so we can do it on products, we will put it in the markets. And anyone will be able to check if this product has been treated, how maintained, and it's just the beginning. Because we could imagine that these products... because you will be able to pay much more if you take a mobile phone. And it's very topical: they tell you that this phone has been repaired and the battery changed, but it wasn't an original part. Will you pay the same price? And if you are told that this product has been maintained, changed, and repaired by an official repairer, well, probably you will give much more value to the product, which gives you much more guarantees. Trust is essential.
