(Reuters) – French building materials group Saint-Gobain reported record operating profit in 2021 on Thursday, as the owner of the Celotex and Lapeyre brands benefited from the buoyant construction sector in the United States and in Asia and its exposure to the European renovation market.
The group, which posted an 18.4% year-on-year increase in like-for-like revenue for 2021, said it had raised prices to try to offset the impact of inflation.
“The price effect reached +6.7% over the year as a whole, and strengthened continuously during the year to reach +9.5% in the second half alone and +10, 3% in the fourth quarter,” Saint-Gobain said in a statement.
The European Commission has called on EU countries to use the €750 billion economic recovery fund to renovate buildings to reduce energy consumption, as soaring prices have slowed industrial production in Europe and drives up household bills.
“If today, we had renovated all the buildings in Europe (…), we would not be dependent on Russian gas and we would not be dependent on a barrel of oil at 100 dollars”, declared to the press the general manager Benoit Bazin, alluding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“In a way, in the medium term, I think it will force all governments to go to green energy and decarbonize, insulate public and private buildings at full speed,” he said.
Benoit Bazin also indicated that the EU had estimated that 35 million buildings must be renovated by 2030 to reach the European objective of carbon neutrality by 2050.
Saint-Gobain recorded a 57.9% increase in its operating income to 4.51 billion euros, which enabled it to generate a double-digit margin for the first time.
(Report Juliette Portala, French version Diana Mandiá, edited by Jean-Michel Bélot)
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