Saint-Malo

"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."

"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."