For the glassmakers at iconic French tableware brand Duralex International SAS, the mornings have become a horror show. Daily updates from energy traders drop into their e-mail inboxes, showing the asphyxiating upward climb of prices for the natural gas and electricity that power their energy-devouring business.
Before the energy crisis — which started during the COVID-19 pandemic and became a full-blown economic threat with Russia’s war in Ukraine — the price charts were reassuringly stable.
They have since become a terrifying succession of peaks and troughs, with Russia choking off cheap natural gas deliveries in a battle of wills with European leaders over their support for Ukraine.
Photo: AP
For Duralex, each price spike represents another bite from the bottom line of a 77-year-old company that counts generations of French families, Mongolian yak herders, Afghan diners and African tea drinkers among worldwide users of its glasses, bowls and plates.
Actor Daniel Craig drank from one its “Picardie” tumblers, with a scorpion on his wrist, when playing James Bond in Skyfall.
With energy costs burning through the firm’s cash reserves and viability, Duralex president Jose-Luis Llacuna is taking radical action that he hopes will save his business: He is stopping production.
The thunderous machines that turn incandescent blobs of molten glass into hundreds of thousands of tableware items each day are to fall silent for a few months on Nov. 1.
Duralex is to join a growing array of European firms that have reduced or halted production because they are hemorrhaging money on the energy needed to keep running.
“The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is look at the daily change in electricity and gas prices,” Llacuna said in an interview at the plant outside Orleans in central France.
“Needless to say, there’s an incredible amount of volatility,” he said. “It’s truly a rollercoaster, and the outlook for the future is a complete unknown.”
Facing the risks of power shortages, rationing and blackouts when demand surges this winter and of an expected recession as businesses shut down, Europe is scrambling for energy alternatives, stockpiling gas and urging consumers to save.
EU energy ministers on Friday struggled to find consensus at emergency talks on the bloc’s latest proposals for alleviating the crisis.
At Duralex, the costs of heating the furnace to above 1,400°C — with roaring torrents of flaming gas transforming the molten glass into tableware on production lines overseen by sweating workers — are set to burn through 40 percent of the company’s revenue if the company keeps producing, “which is untenable,” Llacuna said.
The production shutdown will last at least four months.
The glass furnace cannot be switched off entirely because that could destroy it.
Instead, it would be maintained in a hot slumber, slashing the firm’s energy use by half.
The aim is to then fire it back up by the spring.
In the meantime, the 250 employees are to work fewer days, with drops in pay just as inflation is gnawing at household budgets.
“It’s very hard to stomach,” said Michel Carvalho, a production line crew chief who has been with the company for 17 years.
“Around the world, everyone is suffering from this war,” he said. “We’re hostages. Absolutely. We’re being used. Because being asked to stop work is hard. And we’re not responsible for what is happening.”
Duralex is to fall back on its stockpiles to keep customers supplied during the stoppage, but competitors are circling, using the production halt as an argument to try to lure away the company’s customers, Llacuna said.
He is knocking on government doors for financial help, speaking by telephone to the French economy minister last week.
A prolonged energy crisis could be grim, Llacuna warned.
“It must not last three years,” he said. “Because then European industry will die, and that will be dramatic.”
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