From the bank to the pharmacy, there is a gap that Frédéric Oudéa, current CEO of the Societe Generale Group, is preparing to cross with the ease that is generally attributed to great business leaders.
In a press release published on Monday, the French pharmaceutical group announces, in fact, the appointment of this 59-year-old polytechnician and enarque, the oldest current manager of a bank in France, to its board of directors, as censor. , with immediate effect. It will then be proposed, at the next general meeting of shareholders, to appoint Frédéric Oudéa as non-executive chairman of the board, replacing Serge Weinberg, whose term of office will then have expired.
This appointment marks the epilogue of its decision taken last May, to the surprise of many observers and even some of his relatives on the executive committee, not to seek, in May 2023, a new mandate as general manager, after fifteen years at the head of the banking group. The decision would have been taken in fact as early as December, once all the major projects of the banking group were well on track, such as the merger of retail networks in France or the takeover of the European leader in car leasing LeasePlan.
A journey through adversity
Frédéric Oudéa bounces back where no one really expected him. There is indeed nothing in common between the finance professions and those of the pharmaceutical industry, even if Serge Weinberg, president of Sanofi since 2010, had spent a large part of his career in retail at PPR (which has since become Kering) or in finance (Pallas bank, investment funds, etc.). However, there could be analogies between the two groups, each of which, in its own way, faced a management crisis and a loss of identity.
Frédéric Oudéa arrived at the controls of Societe Generale in 2008 after the Kerviel affair, which permanently damaged the image of the bank, in the midst of the subprime crisis. An appointment by default as the succession of Daniel Bouton, then CEO, was to go to his declared successor, Jean-Pierre Mustier, the powerful boss of investment banking and markets, architect in the 2000s of the bank’s success in equity derivatives, but who had to resign in the face of the scale of the trader fraud scandal.
Since then, Frédéric Oudéa has made every effort to restore the bank’s reputation and accounts, cutting into the workforce and its ambitions, particularly in the markets. A thankless job, not very mobilizing internally, and sometimes criticized when its eternal rival, BNP Paribas, went offshore with great reinforcements of acquisitions in Europe. Over the past two years, the leader had however succeeded in giving the bank a new direction and new ambitions, particularly in retail banking and leasing, even if the forced sale of its Russian subsidiary Rosbank left the group in abeyance. ‘international.
A champion of excellence in loss of meaning
For its part, Sanofi, long a symbol of French excellence in pharmaceutical research (as was Societe Generale on the markets), has today lost much of its luster… and its stock market value (with a which has been standing still for 5 years). The inability of the flagship of the pharmaceutical industry to release a convincing vaccine against Covid-19 was experienced internally as a real trauma and, above all, as the result of twenty years of management which would have favored profitability over innovation. , and not to say, audacity.
The lament of the Sanofi teams is now known: the financiers in power are incapable of taking the slightest risk, which nevertheless makes the fortune of the large laboratories.
However, it is indeed to a financier that the board of directors of Sanofi intends to entrust the reins of the presidency. Frédéric Oudéa’s personality probably has a lot to do with it. Cold-blooded animal, without much affect in the work, the man knew how to overcome many trials and criticisms without deviating from his path.
A man with a fist therefore who will above all have to give meaning to the work and values of the Sanofi teams, burned by five social plans in six years. On the other hand, Frédéric Oudéa will also have to overcome “his conservative spirit”in the words of one of his former collaborators, to rethink the future of Sanofi in a rapidly changing sector.