Meeting with Xavier Janin, President of the Alkern Group

Batinfo: Can you introduce Alkern?

Xavier Janin: The Alkern Group is one of the French leaders in the prefabrication of concrete elements enabling low-carbon construction methods for buildings, offering sustainable city development solutions, having the capacity to infiltrate surface water and offering products beautification of outdoor spaces (gardens, swimming pools, roads).

Manufacturer, for more than 50 years, of prefabricated concrete products in France and Belgium, we design and produce in our 57 factories solutions for Building, Exterior Design and Public Works.

Thanks to its territorial network, Alkern is the leading figure in innovation in precast concrete to provide responsible and concrete solutions to the urgent and mass challenges of adapting our housing and infrastructure.

Our product offering covers 3 main areas of activity:

• With a little more than 35% of our activity, the first is the Public Works division with a range of products that supplies the public works sector.
• The second historical center is obviously Buildings, with around a third of our activity.
• The third division is that of Exterior Design which brings together all prefabricated concrete products for landscaping and beautifying gardens, paving stones for paths, coping around swimming pools, terrace products, etc. This division therefore brings together all the products found in gardens, terraces but also the paving stones found in the streets, particularly draining paving stones, for example.

Batinfo: Where is Alkern today?

Xavier Janin: We are continuing our strategy of growth through acquisition with two recent acquisitions in April 2023 and January 2024 of TP-oriented companies. I also hope to be able to announce a new acquisition by the end of the year...

We are, in a way, consolidating a market that is extremely fragmented with many small structures by aggregating these entities to make Alkern grow.

Our strategy is also based on innovation and particularly on the decarbonization of our processes. These are obviously R&D and co-development projects with partners to replace current cements in the long term.

Batinfo: How is your CSR policy structured?

Xavier Janin: Our CSR policy was implemented in 2021. At the beginning of 2022, we voluntarily released our first CSR report. It is organized around four main pillars:

• A societal pillar: it focuses on our impact on society with our products in construction methods and infrastructure as well as our industrial footprint in the region, in terms of jobs and job stability, for example. , etc...
• A social pillar: this mainly concerns our teams and their management with safety as the first priority but also training, team progression and well-being at work.
• A pillar of governance: that is to say our way of managing the company, the definition of our governance values, particularly in terms of business ethics. For example, we have training to fight corruption. But governance also includes our corporate obligation: to ensure the seriousness and sustainability of the company over time by ensuring our cybersecurity.
• An environmental pillar: we have started to look at the impact of our factories on their environment in a very precise way, such as our electricity consumption per tonne produced, which we have reduced by 5% for almost 3 years. Similarly, last year we began installing water meters on all water sources used in our factories. Since January 2024, we have been able to compare all the water inlets of our factories to identify leaks and be able to learn from the sites that consume the least water in order to limit our impact on this increasingly scarce resource. We also monitor our CO2 emissions and ensure that our waste is sorted at each of our sites to be exemplary.

We are a co-founding member of the organization founded 2 years ago, Écominéro, whose aim is to manage the end of life of mineral products. In this case, we have a collective goal of going from 76% to 90% recycled products. It is with this goal of eco-responsibility that we also look for sources of recycled aggregates around our sites which allow us to integrate this circular economy in a virtuous way.

Batinfo: How do you see the future of Alkern?

Xavier Janin: We obviously have several projects in mind. First, in the long term, we want to continue to grow through acquisition and organic growth. The objective in this case is to double in size by 2030 to reach a turnover of approximately 500 million euros with real financial profitability.

We are also investing in a new factory right now on one of our former industrial sites in Normandy to produce biosourced solutions. These products will be made from miscanthus to replace mineral aggregates from the end of 2025.

As I said previously, new acquisitions are currently being discussed with a potential announcement that I cannot yet confirm by the end of the year.

I always wanted Alkern to be a leader, in the sense of being the most dynamic. Alkern has been in motion for several years now with important issues before us which are the decarbonization of our offer and the inclusion of recycled aggregates in our products to ensure responsible and sustainable growth.