Patrice Lucas, Directeur général du groupe Verallia, est l'invité de Good Morning Business

It's a great performance by our teams, agility, adaptation of our teams. It's also a market that remains very buoyant, with capacity slightly below demand, so we are chasing demand, obviously in consequence, and an energy hedging policy that is rigorous and systematic that we deploy permanently and that has allowed us to be less impacted than at spot cost and to also pass on the benefits to our customers despite the price increases.

With this energy hedging policy that covers over three years at gradual utilization rates. For example, when I enter 2023, I am covered at 85% of my energy needs, which allows me to, finally, not be subject to market volatility, to have visibility to anticipate necessary actions and also to anticipate all discussions with our customers.

No, we aim for profitable growth. Once again, we are in buoyant markets. The market we are in has progressed over the last five years, it progressed on average 2.9% per year. It's essentially bottles, bottles for wine with significant development in jars.

You know that glass has the particularity of being infinitely recyclable, so it fits completely into the societal trend we are in, with reuse that will develop. So we are in this logic of profitable growth. We have just announced new capacities in Europe for 2025 and 2026 with a new furnace in Spain and Italy. So we are determined and we have action plans to move forward and continue our profitable growth.

This is a future that will develop, it remains marginal today with very different maturity depending on the country. In Germany for example, there is a lot of reuse, a lot of deposits. Mineral water bottles are made and average 20 cycles. So these are trends that will develop. I think we want to accompany this, we have a social role in this dynamic.

So our additional capacity, once again, is the response to the profitable growth we want to implement, with an extremely important decarbonization project. Because we have placed, as we say, the LG or our decarbonization at the center, at the heart of the company, at the heart of our strategy, including on energy supply sources.

And we are developing technologies to switch from gas to electricity, so the electric furnace, the electric furnace, with a world first that we announced at the end of 2023: we will launch the first electric furnace to make bottles in Cognac, in our Cognac plant. And in parallel, of course, developing green electricity supply contracts. So these are roadmaps on the production tool. It's just that I take the furnace and replace it. Every time our furnaces reach the end of their life, we will enter a logic of replacement with furnaces that will be green, so to speak, that will switch from gas to electricity with this supply of electricity and Chrysler? So it's a roadmap that we are on. We are committed to reducing our carbon emissions by 46% by 2030 compared to 2019, and we are on this path.

We manufacture a lot of rosé bottles. It's a beautiful bottle, extra-white, beautiful bottles that we make on demand for our clients, Dominity, Domino? And there are jars, all sorts of very beautiful bottles. You have to be close to your customers, that is, there is the transport problem, it's heavy. So when the Americans say 'come to us, we put subsidies on the table', you say 'no, I stay next to my customers.' So we are not present on the American market, or very marginally. We are present in Europe and Latin America, where we have strong growth, strong development. We just opened a furnace at the end of last year to multiply our capacity to accompany growth. And the business we are in is very local. I have this plant in France, the plants are one in Cognac, one near Epernay, one in the south. They are very close to the wine-growing regions to avoid costs and also ensure responsiveness and flexibility towards our customers.