Why Tariffs Could Help This French Logistics Billionaire's Business

Forbes

06-04-2025

ID Logistics
French logistics company ID Logistics took a hit from Trump's tariffs this week, with its stock tumbling 10.7% after they were announced by the U.S. president late Wednesday. Founder and CEO Eric Hémar, whose fortune is held in his 55% stake in ID, lost $200 million, ending the week worth $1.3 billion. It's no surprise given that ID is caught in the middle of the international showdown.
ID—which manages the flow of goods in and out of warehouses for companies like Amazon and Inditex, packaging items before they're shipped to consumers—is the leading logistics company in France, and also has a presence in 18 other countries. Approximately 70% of its $3.6 billion in revenue comes from outside of France, with the greatest share from Poland, followed by the U.S., then Spain and Portugal.
But Hémar, 61, doesn't appear to be rattled. After all, he has never focused on short-term hits, instead keeping an eye on the future. 'That's his strength,' says IDMidCaps analyst Mohamed Mansour. 'He's thinking more long term, compared to many competitors where the managers don't have as much skin in the game.'
When asked about the tariffs, Hémar responded calmly, explaining it was difficult to say. 'My business is domestic,' he said, 'Directly speaking, my business is not concerned. I'm not responsible for the volume between America and Europe. Where I am directly concerned is that my business is sensitive to the economic climate. If it's not going well, people will not buy as many goods from [customers like] Carrefour, Nespresso, Amazon, et cetera. But you know, it is indirect.'
One analyst with whom Forbes spoke thinks that an economic downturn could encourage companies to outsource more of their logistics and drive more business to ID. 'Most of the push towards externalization is actually done during uncertain economic times, when the macroeconomy is not so great,' because companies are then eager to find new ways to cut costs, says Nicolas Delmas, an analyst at Portzamparc Groupe BNP Paribas.
The contract logistics industry barely existed a few decades ago, when most companies handled their own packaging and shipping. Now businesses are increasingly realizing they can save money by outsourcing those tasks. There's extra incentive to do so because supply chains are becoming more time-sensitive and complex, especially with the growth of e-commerce, which requires managing an unprecedentedly large number of products—and often thousands that are added and subtracted weekly—as well as 'reverse logistics,' or customer returns. The industry is set to keep growing: BNP Paribas estimates that the contract logistics market in the U.S. is only 20% built out; the most mature market is the U.K., at just 60%.
'Hemar's not set in his ways. You have some CEOs that have that same background and are kind of stuck, cannot really embrace changes. He's not like that.'
Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, still does most of its own logistics but is slowly externalizing them, and Hémar is the man it chose to initiate that process in the U.S. ID and Amazon started working together in France in 2017, opened a site in Germany the following year, and now partner in six countries—including three warehouses in the U.S., according to BNP. The retailer trusts Hémar with its trickiest tasks: managing the rare products that are hazardous, heavy, bulky or non-sortable, ones that generally can't be automated and sometimes must be moved by forklift.
Logistics companies that nab such gargantuan players early will keep reaping the benefits, because it's often prohibitively risky for customers to switch contractors and potentially disrupt their supply chain. 'The contract logistics business is a little like marriage,' says Hémar. 'When the customer decides to work with you, in his mind, he thinks that he will probably continue in the very, very long term.' Over 90% of ID's customers renew their contracts.
But choosing a logistics love interest is complicated by the fact that most companies aren't all that different from each other. Hémar even admits that ID and its biggest rivals, like GXO and DHL, all have basically the same pricing, technology offerings and customer acquisition strategies.
Without an obvious competitive advantage, then, how does ID set itself apart? 'We understood maybe a little better than some competitors that the real added value of a company like ID Logistics was the service, not the assets,' Hémar says. The company doesn't own its warehouses (it rents them), or the robot technologies it uses on packaging assembly lines (it contracts out the manufacturing of the robots, usually securing a six-month exclusivity period before the manufacturers can sell them elsewhere). This allows ID to tailor warehouses to each customer's needs, and even more crucially, to shift systems quickly when those needs change. 'We focus on innovation a lot,' Hémar explains. 'We propose to use this solution today, but probably the solution will not be exactly the same in three years.'
'That was really the key on my side,' says Gregoire Hirtz, vice president of operations at ManoMano, a European home and garden online marketplace. In 2021, ManoMano was dissatisfied with its logistics partner and had made that rare decision to sever the relationship. It began meeting with Hémar and other potential new contractors. Says Hirtz: 'Where ID Logistics convinced me was that they said, 'Okay, you have a vision of where you want to go. The vision will evolve a lot. What we propose is to define a framework in which we build together.' We were not looking for what is happening usually, where logistics is a kind of commodity—just you buy something, you get something.'
Hirtz signed with ID and kicked off the contract with a particularly difficult assignment: ID had just three months to set up a new warehouse and packaging system from scratch and transfer over all goods before Black Friday, that late November day kicking off the most important retail weekend of the year. Hémar pulled it off, and Hirtz was so impressed that he extended ID's contract early, turning a three-year deal into five years. ID handles about 30% of ManoMano's logistics now and has overseen a doubling of its warehouse size and 6x growth in the volume of goods since beginning the partnership. Hirtz says Hémar takes the time to meet with him two times a year, despite being one of his smaller customers.
In fact, Hémar visits clients every week. He spoke to Forbes on a video call from Paris a few days after he'd met with Amazon in Luxembourg. The week before that, he was in Spain with the fast fashion group Inditex (parent of Zara and several other chains), for which ID fills customer orders and handles some returns and repairs. He tries to visit every country where ID has warehouses at least once a year and is often traveling on weekends. In addition, he spends at least two days out of every week in Paris, where he lives, and two days in Orgon, the small town where ID is based in the south of France.
Hémar was born in Paris, but his family comes from Brittany, a region in northwestern France where he says people are known for being stubborn. Many of his early years were spent climbing a traditional ladder to success: Top-notch grades allowed him to attend France's National School of Administration (ENA), a highly selective post-graduate university for training civil servants. Famous alumni include 13 French presidents and prime ministers, as well as many business executives. The school was criticized for contributing to the dominance of elites in the French government, and President Emmanuel Macron (an ENA graduate) closed it in 2021.
'He's kind of the archetype of a CEO of a SBF 120 company in France,' says Delmas, referencing an index of the most actively traded stocks on the Paris market. 'But he's not set in his ways. You have some CEOs that have that same background and are kind of stuck, cannot really embrace changes. He's not like that.'
In part, that's because Hémar was still a child when he learned the limits of being 'just' a CEO. His father was rising in the ranks of multinational conglomerate Suez Group, but over meals at home in Paris, he'd vent to his family about being beholden to shareholder interests and fantasize about the investments he'd pursue if he had ultimate decision-making power. By the early 1990s, his father had been promoted to the head of ISM, a Suez subsidiary that controlled seven real estate companies, but was forced to watch helplessly as the owners—facing financial problems and needing liquidity—reorganized Suez and sold off many ISM assets, Hémar remembers. He ended up retiring early. Hémar watched and thought, ''I'd like to be my own boss.''
'I always said if I could create my own company, I would,' says Hémar. 'And I was lucky that in logistics, you can do it, because the level of investment is not so huge and you can grow piece by piece.'
After graduating from ENA, Hémar spent four years at France's national audits court, did a stint at the equipment and transport ministry—where he picked up his interest in transportation—and then moved to a subsidiary of SNCF, France's state-owned railway company. SNCF spun off its non-rail holdings in 1995 to form Geodis and tried to recruit Hémar to a new logistics unit there. His boss told him bluntly that no one else wanted the job. 'Nobody was interested in logistics,' Hémar remembers. 'They considered it as only a way to add volume to transportation activity.' But he decided to give it a try.
Those five years at Geodis, including four as deputy director, were Hémar's training in the industry. But Geodis was struggling with financial problems, and when new leadership came in 2001 and threatened to reorganize the business (harkening back to Hémar's father's travails a decade earlier), he decided to finally pursue his lifelong dream of starting a company. He spotted an opportunity to acquire his first customer, the French supermarket Carrefour, by taking over a small logistics business near Avignon that was working with the chain. He founded ID Logistics there with an initial investment of roughly $1.2 million: one-third each from his own savings and those of his father and his father-in-law. ('I reimbursed [them later],' he assures.)
It's unusual for a significant multinational company to be based outside of Paris, but he stayed in the region where he started—it's a 'great place to attract talent and keep it' says Hémar—and still works with Carrefour. 'It's remote,' Hirtz notes, and makes a comparison: 'Instead of being based out of New York, you are somewhere in Alabama.'
'He had a vision,' says TP ICAP analyst Florent Thy-Tine. 'At the time, the outsourcing rate was quite low. He could see that contract logistics would grow.' In particular, Hémar had noticed that French retailers were increasingly exporting products to what were then called 'emerging markets' in South America and East Asia but didn't have effective logistics systems on the ground in those places. 'There was nobody who wanted to put their finger in this type of country,' he remembers.
ID Logistics opened its first subsidiary in Taiwan, following Carrefour there in early 2002. By 2012, ID had expanded to a dozen countries—entering them judiciously, almost always at the request of existing clients that were expanding their footprints—and wanted to begin making more significant acquisitions. That year it listed 25% of its shares in an IPO that raised about $35 million. Hémar followed that up in 2013 by buying CEPL, a French competitor that specialized in retail order fulfillment. More recently he's picked up Atlanta-based Kane Logistics (2022) and Stryków-based Spedimex (2023) in Poland.
One of Hémar's areas of focus right now is artificial intelligence, though he doesn't expect it to revolutionize the business. ID is experimenting with AI tech that creates a 'digital twin' of a warehouse showing the flows of goods in real time. The model immediately sends alerts when it spots problems and analyzes ways to optimize efficiency. A few particularly complicated ID warehouses use them so far. Overall, though, Hémar expects a bigger impact to come from increased automation, meaning that he'll rely more on robots to take care of packaging and storage. He doesn't think there will ever be warehouses that are entirely run by robots—about 60% of processes are very difficult to automate, he says. Regardless, he's not worried about automation causing significant job losses because logistics has long had worker shortages.
Despite global tensions, expanding in North America is one of Hémar's current top priorities. He says that ID just moved into Canada for the first time, though he can't yet share with which customer, and that he's also eyeing Mexico. And it continues to see great potential in the U.S., where its revenue grew more than 40% last year and it still holds less than 2% market share.
Growth within North America's burgeoning market is essential if ID is going to maintain its routine of doubling its revenue every five years, which Hémar says is his goal. Luckily, enlarging ID's portfolio is one of his favorite parts of the job: 'When we win a new customer, that means we're able to convince this guy that we are good,' he says. 'It's a real satisfaction.'