It may be disconcerting that the head of a large European trading group talks about consuming less. As if he were throwing stones at his own roof. Or as if he issued a strange challenge.
“In Europe we are beginning to feel the need to moderate our desires and consume less,” writes Enrique Martínez, general director of Fnac-Darty, in a book recently published in French, And if on consommait mieux (And if we consumed better). “We are committed to encouraging our customers to consume better,” she says a few pages later, “and, if necessary, less.” Contradiction? Or audacity?
“What I am saying is, first, that we have to help customers consume better, and consuming better means rationalizing our purchases, buying better quality products, repairing them, and having a different sensitivity in the use of the product and the material,” responds in an interview with El PAÍS. “I want my clients to consume less, but I also want to gain more clients, and help more consumers share with us this model of more responsible consumption.”
Martínez (Valencia, 53 years old) is an atypical business leader. A foreigner at the helm of a group doubly emblematic of French capitalism: the Darty appliance chain, founded by a family whose mother was murdered in Auschwitz, and the Fnac bookstore and electronics chain, “a cultural institution like the Louvre or the Pompidou Center.” ”, he points out. “I feel privileged.” A Spaniard outside the circles of the French elites trained—sometimes one would say formatted—in the same great schools, educational centers of excellence and very selective that produce the political and business ruling class.
He has some outsider, outside the system. Here is a merchant convinced that “the era of hyperconsumption is over.” He bets in the book on “a third way… equally distant from hyperconsumption and deconsumption.” His strategy responds to the climate crisis and demands for sobriety after decades of excess, but it also has its roots in Darty’s own history. “A customer will only be satisfied if what he buys works and provides the services expected,” believed the founding brothers of the chain, for whom the quick repair of the products they sold was a true hallmark. And there is something of the spirit of the original Fnac, too, whose founders, says Martínez, “were protesters of the established model… and grew up with a strong social dimension.”
It is 8:30 a.m. on a Wednesday in May and the boss of Fnac-Darty—a group that had a turnover of 7,875 million euros last year and is worth almost 900 million on the stock market—arrives by bicycle at the historic headquarters of Fnac in the Parisian rue de Rennes. We go up to the office. There, over a coffee, he begins by telling us about his origins, his childhood and family.
It was a working class family from Granada and Murcia, which emigrated to Valencia in the sixties. Four brothers. The little one, Sergio, had a career as a professional footballer for Levante and Villarreal, among other teams. He was known as Ballesteros, his second surname. Enrique played basketball and at the age of 14 he set up a school for this sport. He was on the verge of becoming a professional, but he opted to study Economics and upon finishing he joined the North American multinational Toys R Us, which had just landed in Spain. It was the early 90s. Toys R Us was expanding to Portugal, and he settled there.
In 1998, when Fnac arrived in Portugal, they signed him. He later headed Fnac in Spain and in 2012 he arrived in France to head Fnac in this country. A year later, the company went public and in 2016 he bought Darty: a change of era. In 2017, he was promoted to CEO of the entire group, more than 24,000 employees and present in 13 countries (in addition to France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Tunisia, Qatar, Ivory Coast, Cameroon). He is now trying to promote fundamental change.
“We have lived,” he says, “in a time when everything was so cheap due to globalization and the manufacturing of products in China, that in the end the repair equation did not pay off. It was more expensive to almost repair than to buy. And that cannot be.” And he adds: “That repair industry is almost disappearing. It is a workforce that was developed 30 or 40 years ago, when Europe had a lot of industry. Today in schools no one wants to be an electromechanic.” Martínez explains that Fnac-Darty has already trained more than a thousand people in the last four years and that it repairs 2.5 million products annually (before it was 1.5 million). “The secret of this movement,” he adds, “is to be less dependent on the sale of physical products and to begin to open the business more to the service part. That is, being able to better support the use of the product and even, at the end of the product’s life, recover it, recondition it and sell it again.”
The threat of Amazon
The other star product, in addition to Darty appliances, are Fnac books. And here the problem has a name: Amazon. “It’s a devourer,” he declares. “I think that the book really interests them little.” And he warns: “The book market runs a serious risk of being very dependent on a company for which the world of culture is not its main objective.”
In And if on consommait mieux, Martínez denounces as “immoral” the practice of companies that install their European headquarters in Luxembourg to “avoid their obligations to pay corporate taxes… while the majority of French distributors must give up 40% of their profits.” He points out in the interview: “We must defend the European social model, which is based on companies that are in Europe respecting this European model.”
At the end of the interview, the question arises as to whether the plans of the conglomerate he directs include expanding into Spain. That is, if, as happened a few years ago in France with the acquisition of Darty or recently in Portugal with MediaMarkt, Fnac could join another company in its country. “In Spain we have not found the click so far.” Are there plans? “Being Spanish, imagine… It would be my dream,” he concludes.
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