A family-run company in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region out to capture the world

For nearly two hundred years, the company Verrerie cristallerie d'Arques in Arques, a small town in the Pas-de-Calais département, has continued to grow and is now the third largest industrial site in France with almost twelve thousand employees. It has belonged to the Durand family for more than a century, and has developed an extremely centralised, productive and managerial model which has allowed the company to export its products throughout the world successfully. At the end of the 1990s, there was both a change in the composition of company management (the younger generation took over) and a change in market conditions which brought about wide-reaching reforms. The company became Arc International. It started manufacturing industrial tools abroad, and tried hard to adapt itself to the culture of its clients and to give its executives a sense of responsibility. At the same time, a massive reorganisation on the Arques site took place smoothly because of the company's tradition of taking care of its staff and providing support for public authorities.