Good morning! Tapestry and Capri call off their merger, 1.25 million new users turn to Bluesky, and a CEO evolved with her $49 billion company. Have a peaceful weekend.
- Climate change. Estelle Brachlianoff is one of the most influential female CEOs in Europe. Her $49 billion company, Veolia, is ranked No. 77 on the Fortune 500 Europe (where only 6.2% of companies have female chiefs) and No. 308 on the Global 500 (where the stat is even lower, at 5.6%). But it's hard to explain to the general public what Veolia does. "We're quite unique, so therefore we don't have many comparison points," Brachlianoff says.
Brachlianoff joined Veolia almost 20 years ago, so she's had time to practice her elevator pitch—but the business has changed dramatically in two decades. Today, Veolia provides solutions for "ecological transformation," Brachlianoff says. That includes waste management, water supply, and energy, from wastewater collection and hazardous waste treatment to controlling heating and air conditioning throughout cities. In recent years, Veolia has shifted from a more traditional approach to those industries, to pitching itself as a business that can help others adapt to climate change. Recently, Veolia helped Paris clean the Seine so athletes could swim in the famously filthy river during the Olympics.
In the two decades Brachlianoff has worked at this business, she's seen attitudes toward climate change evolve. "We have moved from the realization, which is now shared, to the what can we do about it? I think that's really a big, big shift," she says.
Technology has evolved too. "Twenty years ago, we thought a few things were absolutely impossible, and I've seen them happening. We thought we couldn't recycle things, which now we can recycle," she says—like copper from a nuclear facility. "We are much more efficient in many, many ways. We are even using gen AI to save energy on water. Would you think that would be possible 20 years ago?"
Veolia is based in France, but Brachlianoff characterizes it as a global company, not a French one. Forty percent of its business is outside of Europe. Brachlianoff gets in the weeds of state and municipal law from California to Ohio and can talk at length about the differences between operating in a country with a centralized local governmental system (as she did in the U.K.) or a more distributed one.
The Paris Olympics were a start, but the CEO's hope is that Veolia becomes a company that people besides climate experts and local government officials are familiar with. "[In 10 years] the general public will probably know us better," she says. "We don't have anything to sell to the general public—but we are here."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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