Nurturing the economic base

All over the world, Total strives to build long-term operations, make them more acceptable and nurture an “ecosystem” of contractors, small businesses and micro-businesses that directly or indirectly benefit from our activities. Coordinated by Total Développement Régional (TDR), the support we provide in our host regions to start up, acquire or expand businesses supplements our local content and community initiatives. It fulfils the same corporate responsibility with respect to our socioeconomic environment.

Financial assistance, skill sharing, technology and management expertise, and knowledge of international markets and growth drivers have proved their value in France for decades.

The process is currently being deployed more widely in Europe and in non-OECD countries, such as the Republic of the Congo, Angola and Syria. We generally view our commitment to promoting entrepreneurship as a long-term one, especially in non-OECD regions, where projects take five to ten years to get off the ground.

In every case, listening, mutual respect and recognition of common interests are the cornerstones of our partnerships with the businesses we support. The primary purpose is to create or maintain jobs in a variety of sectors.

In 25 years, 3,200 small businesses have been helped and 50,000 jobs have been created. The 2010 target is to support more than 4,500 businesses in around 20 countries.

Encouraging European small businesses to innovate and diversify into new markets

In 2007, Total’s senior executives and three European trade union federations signed a Europe-wide framework agreement that includes a 36-month trial implementation period in four regional employment areas. It describes the financial, technology and export support that we can provide for start-ups and small business expansion projects, including companies created via intrapreneurship, near our main European facilities.

Under a business agreement signed in early 2008, Total Petrochemicals’ Feluy site in Belgium is participating in the trial. In December, a delegation travelled to Qatar to put representatives of small businesses from the French-speaking region of Belgium in touch with sold-to parties in the emirate, where Total is a partner in a number of projects, including a polyethylene plant and an ethane cracker that will be commissioned in 2009. The event gave Belgian entrepreneurs a chance to present their products and know-how to local manufacturers, with a view to developing business relations at all levels and encouraging the transfer of skills between large manufacturers and these small businesses.

There are plans to replicate the basic program in 2009, since several other sites have expressed a desire to take part, notably in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Spain.

France’s Small Business Pact

Total joined France’s Small Business Pact in April 2007. Implemented in late 2005 by OSEO, a French agency supporting small business innovation and growth, and the Comité Richelieu association of innovative small businesses, the pact is designed to facilitate relations between large companies and innovative small businesses to spur the latter’s growth.

Total has already submitted three key research topics to the signatory small businesses: biometrics, sensors and new utilities technologies (steam, electricity, etc.).

We also participate in the International Small Business Export Piggyback Program, launched on March 4, 2009. Overseen and managed by the Comité Richelieu, the new initiative brings together large companies, small businesses and public authorities.

It aims to encourage large exporters to piggyback smaller businesses to give new impetus to this mechanism by ensuring a win-win situation for all involved. “Strategic piggybacking” now goes beyond advice and logistical support; large French companies with operations outside France actively help their suppliers and partners break into export markets.

Encouraging startups by young entrepreneurs in France

The Total Foundation is donating €150,000 to NGO Association pour le Droit à l’Activité Économique (ADIE) to support the CréaJeunes initiative. Deployed in six population centers — Greater Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing and Lyon — the program aims to help young people aged 18 to 30 from disadvantaged neighborhoods create 1,000 businesses by end-2009. Support includes coaching and job training. By offering loans to people shut out of the banking system, ADIE, a microcrédit pioneer in France, has helped create 51,000 microbusinesses and 62,000 jobs over the last 20 years.