Grégoire Morineaux s point of view, as Industrial Market Director, Rexel France, on the industrial market
Our strengths are specialization, an omnichannel approach, and technical expertise. With a dedicated structure for our industrial clients staffed with around 125 specialized salespeople, our customers have daily contact with their counterparts who understand their sectors and businesses challenges. Along with these specialized advisers, our webshop has become a market reference, offering specific contents by customer and business segment, such as maintenance or safety. Finally, our technical expertise has deepened. We have a team of 80 technicians, experts in industrial processes, whose skills go beyond automatic control systems, toward industrial networks, cybersecurity, robotics, and the entire industrial digitization chain, from intelligent sensors to Edge or Cloud computing software solutions. All this complementary expertise is aligned with the digital industry trend. We won several great projects in 2020 in the energy efficiency optimization of production facilities, mostly involving the transformation of lighting with LEDs, as well as accompanying our customers abroad with specific logistics services, modernizing production automation with secure solutions, and offering repair services or customized kit preparation. 4.0 projects have progressed mainly in the fields of mobile cobotics, network security (including cybersecurity) and the monitoring of industrial processes via Edge computing solutions or smart sensors. We can also mention an interesting partnership, launched in 2019, with the French startup
Usitab. It enabled us to offer an application that digitalizes all the maintenance and production processes on industrial sites. An on-site operator performs the production monitoring surveys, and all the collected data instantly feeds into the quality management system, ensuring real-time and remote production and maintenance surveillance for one or several sites. About the industrial market, the shock of the lockdown was less consequential than in the building sector, but there are many uncertainties about the future. Most of all, they are linked to the evolution of state support and to business recovery, which will fill the order books for 2021 and beyond. But there are also reasons to be optimistic, based on the industrial offering s capacity for ecological and digital transformation. This change would be an excellent opportunity for Rexel, just like energy renovation in residential buildings. And we see that the directions of the France recovery plan, namely industry decarbonization and digitization, will stimulate this change. As our industrial customers productivity and competitivity challenges are increasingly related to reliability and responsiveness, Rexel has solid strengths. Therefore, our priorities remain the same, while accelerating the development of our offering of digitization and energy- efficient solutions for the industry.