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Frédéric
MEEUS
Belgian citizen
Seconded to Total Petrochemicals/Base Chemicals
in Belgium. Propylene Product Flow Coordinator.
Qualified as a Sales Engineer at UCL.
Has been with the Group for just under 8
years, during which he has acquired international
experience in marketing, sales and logistics.
I wrote my end-of-studies dissertation on
the extraction and conversion of aromatics
(benzene, toluene and xylene) in petrol,
at the Antwerp Refinery. That was with Petrofina,
where I spent a few days a week during my
last semester at University.
I was looking for an international job in
a small sales and marketing team. I sent
Petrofina an application, and they offered
me exactly that.
A worldwide market.
I started out as Area Manager. I was based
in Ertvelde, near Ghent, and put in charge
of automotive and industrial lubricant exports
to a huge area (Africa, the Middle East
and Latin America). My job covered marketing
(defining ranges, packaging, pricing and
communication campaigns) and sales (setting
up distribution networks). The results were
encouraging: 30% development a year. And
that also meant I had to travel a lot: I
spent about 100 days a year away building
and running that distribution network.
When Total and Petrofina merged, I was transferred
to Paris and assigned to Total Overseas,
the division that runs the Group’s
Refining and Marketing subsidiaries in Africa
and the Middle East. The goal was to merge
the Fina lubricants distribution network
into the Total subsidiaries in the area.
I spent a year and a half doing that.
From a vast area
to a tiny country.
That was when I started fancying full-time
expatriation. I was appointed Sales Director
at our subsidiary in Costa Rica, and based
in San José. At the time, we only
had two service stations: an Elf one and
a third-party one. We had a good presence
on the LPG market and a small share in the
lubricants market through Elf.
Two years (and a lot of recruiting, training,
assessing potential, planning and buying
or leasing stations) later, we had 15 Total
stations. We had also introduced Total lubricants
and our market share had rocketed.
A variety of functions
and horizons.
After that, I moved back to Belgium, to
the Chemicals Branch, to work in Propylene.
Propylene is a bit like propane: it polymerises
and has a number of applications in the
plastics sector. Total has 13 plants making
propylene around Europe. The propylene we
make has to be delivered to clients by pipeline,
water or train. As we can only store it
for a few days, we have to keep our workflow
tight.
As flow coordinator, I have to balance out
the workload between the plants and the
factories where our clients process our
propylene. Of course, we have to adjust
the flow all the time: our forecasts are
based on theoretical production and consumption
figures. We often buy, sell or swap our
products on the market. So half my job involves
juggling schedules, and the other half involves
dealing with the market.
I found the diversity I was looking for
at Total. I’ve done international
marketing, worked in a tiny country, Costa
Rica, and now I’m dealing with a high-volume
product on an international scale (we produce
about 2.2 million tonnes, generating about
€ 1 billion a year).
To conclude, I’d say I’ve also
found an international group with a really
European identity. It has allowed me to
live in three different countries and to
discover another thirty!
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