Blow Up the Entire Chain at Once

"François Pinault then realized that the only way out for him was to forcibly carve out a role that was not planned. He took the plunge, not just metaphorically, and decided to blow up not one link, but the entire chain at once, which involved switching from loading one or two wagons at Saint-Malo to an entire ship in Scandinavia and, importantly, featuring only one intermediary agent instead three, the agent of the sellers. This was feasible for someone who had no experience in maritime transportation because this agent of the Scandinavian exporters also took care of the chartering of the ships. However, this was a transition from one or two wagons to a ship, which is a change in scale in volumes and in money from one not to ten or twenty, but squarely to a hundred."

"From this moment on, and for as long as his main objective will be the timber industry, his fixed idea will be to combine his own growth with that of his profit margins. This can only be achieved by conquering new positions first upstream and then downstream, in order to eliminate as many intermediaries from his circuit as possible, and also to secure his rear."

"There is already a regular shuttle of boats working for him between Saint-Malo, Sweden, Finland and even the Soviet Union. In less than four years, he has radically eliminated intermediaries from his import chain and modernized it to the extent of the revolution in communications that we are now beginning to see the first signs of. It is a global qualitative leap where François Pinault is no longer just attacking routine."

"They finally admit to me that it is the importing firm, my direct competitor but their main client, who threatened them: "If you unload Pinault's wood, we will divert our ships to another port." I managed to shake them, but they didn't want to take risks for me. Dockers have a monopoly. We cannot use labor outside of them. Finally, to prevent my boat from having to go elsewhere, which would have resulted in a great waste of time and even more money for me, by repeatedly arguing that an additional importer was more work for them in the long term, they compromised: "If you bring in your own staff, we will turn a blind eye." They were opening a door for me.""