Next year, Socomore, an intermediate-sized Breton company based in Vannes (Morbihan), will celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Its president, Frédéric Lescure, promises a “
big party
” to celebrate the journey of this
“agile dinosaur
”, who has just won the Victories for sustainable growth, organized by CroissancePlus, KPMG, BNP Paribas and
Le Figaro
.
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Socomore is a French chemistry champion for the treatment of metal surfaces and composite materials. Its customers are above all aeronautics manufacturers. The company holds the secret to the black anti-corrosion paint on the Airbus A 320 and Boeing 707 engines. It is also the company who developed a silver-based coating to protect planes from lightning strikes.
At 61, the manager, who wears the blue rooster, emblem of the French Fab, on the lapel of his jacket, does not miss an opportunity to also promote the P'tit Club, an associative network of inter-company nurseries created on his initiative. He also does not fail to distribute around him the bottles of the first disinfectant against Covid-19 to be able to be used for babies from 3 months. It has just acquired the Vosges plant chemistry laboratory Salveco which manufactures it.
He had coveted this chemist for a long time, strong
in “concrete patents”
and he is happy to have thus diversified his activities.
The crisis has shown the need for it.
Launching into the improvised, emergency manufacturing of hydroalcoholic gel (2 million liters produced) at the start of the pandemic, at the request of the prefect, helped Socomore to hold on during this year when "it
was very difficult in the aero
".
The chance to be French
Aeronautics indeed represents 70% of its activities.
Automotive, energy and rail in particular do the rest.
“
We are lucky to be French.
In aeronautics, it is excellence.
France is the only country in Europe capable of fully producing an aircraft, like the United States or Russia.
"
Read also:
End of mega-deals in aeronautics
If Saint-Gobain, the group where he had made a career, had not sold the cardboard factory of which he was general manager to the Irish Smurfit, in Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine), Frédéric Lescure would undoubtedly not have launched in this adventure.
He was then 38 years old.
A few months after the sale, he resigned and went in search of a business to take over.
It had to be industrial and manufacture consumables for professional customers.
Among the proposals, he set his sights in 1998 on Socomore: 21 million francs in turnover at the time, 27 employees.
It already supplies Aerospatiale, the ancestor of Airbus, with solvents to clean aircraft structural parts before their assembly.
Frédéric Lescure invests his personal savings, surrounds himself with investment funds (Siparex the shoulder), adds an "E" in the name of the SME and counts on innovation.
By imagining before everyone else, in the early 2000s, wipes for applying solvents, he scored a first point.
“This system reduced waste by 80%, and emissions of VOCs, volatile organic compounds, by 90%,”
he recalls.
From innovation to innovation, Socomore, of which it is still the majority shareholder, is expanding its activities.
It is pushing its pawns internationally, first in Europe, then Asia and Russia, North America, to serve Bombardier, and South, for the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer.
A fabulous ecosystem
“We grew up quietly. In aeronautics, things generally move fairly slowly, which gives you time to prepare, ”
says Frédéric Lescure. Socomore currently generates nearly 70 million euros in sales and employs 300 people.
“With us, 15% of the workforce invests in R&D,” he
summarizes. The ETI has six factories, mainly in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada and China. Its premises in Vannes belong to the employees. They were able to become shareholders of the SCI which owns them.
"Two-thirds of the employees chose to buy shares for the construction project which amounted to 6 million euros"
, specifies Frédéric Lescure. He now wants to develop employee shareholding by creating a company mutual fund.
"Already, we pay in incentive and profit sharing five times more to employees than dividends to shareholders," he
notes.
The pandemic has certainly put the company to the test.
“But this fabulous ecosystem that we have in France made it possible to overcome the crisis.
At the end of 2020, Airbus prepaid its suppliers for the following three months.
The entire industry is organized to come to the aid of the most vulnerable, there have been very few disasters, also thanks to the long-term partial activity set up by the State, ”
says Frédéric Lescure.
He knows that the next three or four years will undoubtedly be more complicated than expected.
But it has already set up growth drivers with Salveco.
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