 Thank you very much Brandon and to all your team also for inviting us and I would like also to thank our The two previous speakers who came from very different perspectives. I think that mine is is going to be also quite Different first an apology it should have been Frederick de Vos or northern Europe CEO who should have presented today Chris said he felt a bit of an imposter I think would be the same way this morning because I've been doing my career mostly abroad so the French model is not my forte But I know it well enough I believe Just a few comments about the previous presentation Scottish water is our biggest customer in Britain in our non-regulated business And I was quite impressed by the democratic Dimension it goes beyond social Brandon the democratic dimension of the way Water is managed in the Netherlands called the pay bar Same notion you may feel that Ireland has a complex administrative organization and political organization frankly instead of three levels as in the Netherlands France has four levels of of Democratic representation, we have the state of course we have regions 20 regions we have 95 department equivalent to counties and we have believe it or not 36,000 Municipalities for So it's a huge complexity since Julius say Caesar not medicines have changed in that in that respect so The state What differentiates France from From many other countries is the fact that water mark the water market is mostly operated by private operators Of course the key public authorities are national government We have six water agencies which are mostly on river basing the principles and A lot of the responsibilities for managing water is delegated to the commune which are the municipalities and The provision of the service is being done either by by the commune themselves by the municipalities or by private operators Such as the area. So that's the 70 Something percent of water volume, which is delivered by private operators in the country And overall they supply more than four billion cubic meters of water every year In fact, it's an The market is mostly Shared between three main operators. I'm sorry to say they only eyes the first one with a market share of About 40% in the water sector A bit less than 30% in the sanitation sector Suez environment is the second operator and So as a you are Is is the third one, but we have a host of smaller operators who play their role and who keep a competitive Pressure on on the market Just give you an overview about what's happening in the rest of Europe in terms of Delegation to private operators as you can see Germany is on the left for those who are at the back Germany has Opened about one-third of its market to private operators England is fully on Open to private it's a full fledged privatization as you know Spain is pretty open with 56% France we are at the 70 plus figures that indicated Netherlands is purely public and Places like Poland in the east are slowly opening to private operations It's a rather stable marketplace in fact a lot of A lot of contracts are being rebelled every year You have about 9,500 400 or 500 Contracts with private operators in the country Between water and wastewater and about 700 of them. That's an average are being rebelled every year So the pressure is absolutely intense But overall until the recent two or three years It was a zero-sum game Municipalities elected to come back to public operations But some of them moved are still moving to private operations a major change occurred in 2010 Paris who had been privately operated for 25 years Decided for strictly political I and it's a choice. It's political democratic choice elected to come back to public operations I must say that that was done after considerable improvement of the quality of the service when we took over Paris 27 years ago now The leakage rate was 22% when we handed back The system to the Paris municipality leakage was about 3.6% So it's not a matter of performance. It's a matter of political choice, which is absolutely Fine, it's the rule of the game What we hope is that in the end the water consumer will find its interest in that in that change Paris at the same time the suburbs of Paris, which is a huge Population about 4.3 million people Tendered their water system more or less at the same time and It was won by by the area and we are now operating that contract for the next 12 years and We are serving those 4.3 million people so Paris is not the greater Paris is split in a sense between private operations and public operations Paris Center is only two million people Paris suburbs 4.3 Water services can be broken down, you know in three main main areas. You have the networks You have the plants that either collect the sewage or distribute The water and you have customer service in the center and I just want those slides are intended to help you understand how things are Delegated partially or totally to the private sector or fully internalized within the municipalities within that Those three concentric discs What can the spectrum of what can be delegated Can move from the simplest which is operations and maintenance at the top To some level of renewal of the equipment on the within the plants and within the networks to new works and When a private operator owns some of the some of the assets Of course, it has to take charge of the financial dimension What you must bear in mind is that in front what characterizes the French market is a huge variety variety story of types of contracts there is a whole whole whole continuum of Contracts from the simplest O&M operations and maintenance contract to what is called concession I will come back on this notion in a few minutes but in fact a lot of The key aspects of those contracts are tailored to the needs of the local authorities and that's an essential So that it matches their their strategy their financial constraints Williness of their mayor Affermage Which is the word or it's French word, but it's been now recognized because it's a it's a concept that has now been Transferred to other countries after much is a way to manage Water which is very widely used in France So in an affair in a typical affirmage system The private operator would take over the three The three layers that I described earlier the networks the plant the customer service but usually The operator would not Invest massively at least in the assets now are still owned by the the public authority on some occasions The other the private operator would invest in some new works It's a quite Rare, but it was usually Invest in the renewal of some major equipment pumps tanks whatever The second main contract type of contract is the concession As you can see it goes much further Even if ultimately the local authority will retain the ownership of the assets in that case the private operator has the responsibility for investing in the new assets in building them of course in a competitive process in the transplant process, but Some private financing is injected in that kind of contract The next slide tries to convey that that notion that over the nine thousand plus existing contracts with private Operators in France you have a full continuum of solutions from the hard concession contracts with a wide Level of investment by the private operator to the very light operations and maintenance contracts which Are the simplest to to manage The regulation of and governance of this Situation is is extremely complex you believe that the Dutch model Was was a difficult one to to understand to grasp at first sight the French one is even more challenging No single government office oversees the the world sector The mayor of each municipality must report publicly on the performance And you have a host of other bodies that control What what is being done by the municipalities or between the municipalities and the private operators? Of course, you have a fraction licenses You have a competition commission. You have a pollution regulator. You have also the health authorities all of them are playing a role and When I've tried to improve those slides yesterday evening, I Wanted to do kind of simple drawing after half an hour. I dropped it the Competition again is a pretty similar manner There is no national regulatory agency to approve the rates or define the service standards in fact What characterizes also the Situation in France is that water pays for water, but it pays fully for water so it depends exactly on the difficulty on the technical difficulty and on the Quality of the existing assets And it happens that Municipality a can pay its water Three euros per cubic meter and municipality be people in municipality be nearby Just a boundary between them. They happen to pay five euros per cubic meter because the full cost of The provision will be recognized locally at the local level So at the moment no per equation system exists except when the municipalities have decided to group together and and form syndicates That that enable them to share resources share investments That's the only way per equation to the consumer is achieved. I won't spend too much time on this In a similar manner to what happens in the Netherlands, we have those six water basins Of course, you have 25 in the Netherlands. We have six in France Each of them is on a given river basin There is one for the Rowan River one for the Saint River and so on so forth. I will do redo the geography of France It's a rather democratic instance also for us that collects abstraction fees that collects Disposal fees and then Generates subsidies to the municipalities for their investments. So there is a board on each of those river basin agencies That defines the level of the fees that defines the allocation of the money to the virus syndicate or individual You may wonder why this complex if not complicated model works I think that it's because it has that very well defined and very flexible contractual framework that we can pick in We have also a complex organization of public bodies in charge of the water matters it could be simpler and Also, we have that intense again competition between operators themselves when when a municipality has decided to outsource and you have That constant alternative for the municipalities who elect to operate themselves their water will to delegate it The private sector This very intense competitive landscape and the fact that all the operators over time have grown quite substantially made sure that a huge body of engineers of technicians And that a lot of technologies have been developed over time in the country and Francis big exporter of water services and here an example of that I'm trying to So it gives a competitive edge to to the municipalities to have that contractual flexibility to have that wealth of human competencies and of technologies in the end The the end result of that is a high quality water service All the KPIs at the industry are pretty good I must say at this point in time the conformity of water quality to standards is above 99 percent I hope that we hope that at some time we'll fight for the Third nine in that indicator The physical chemical is slightly under that but close to 99 percent The number of complaints that are received for the public France wide irrespective of private public considerations is very low with 4.6 per thousand per year And the non-programmed service interruptions for Our consumers per thousand consumers is about three per year, which is which is I say Pretty good at this at this point in time The prices have been under control I'm sorry, but the graph is bit difficult to read for those at the back The timescale starts from 99 here to 2009 here and you have a basket of different indices The water index is that line here Which is pretty much in line with the the public transportation index and the increase was The index was a hundred and in 99 it was 120 about 125 10 years later So the prices of water have not raised significantly between that that time but of course a number of other indexes such as construction costs in black or of course fuel in blue Have raised Considerably so overall the prices because of that intense competition landscape have been in check and Consumers seems to be satisfied with this the most recent panels show that 77% of the public is satisfied with their water consumption I don't have the figures for the Disatisfied ones, but I suppose that are a number of neutrals who take for granted that they have water at the tap every morning they should not And The other graph is a funny one. I liked it It shows that the consumption of bottled water in France has been decreasing overall since 2003 it's now below 50% of households that do a regular consumption of bottled water While the consumption of tap water has raised very significantly and of course our job is to promote Tap water not because it increases the volumes the volumes are dropping all the time because of the benefits of Global public education, which is which is conducted But it makes no sense buying your water seven times more Dealing than than when you have on the top no people from Nestle or Danone in the room. I hope And thank you very much for your attention