Engie

Engie SA (stylised in all caps as ENGIE) is a French multinational electric utility company, headquartered in La Défense, Courbevoie. Its activities cover electricity generation and distribution, natural gas, nuclear power, renewable energy, district energy, and the petroleum industry. It is involved in both upstream (engineering, sale, operation, maintenance) and downstream (waste management, dismantling) activities.

Engie supplies electricity to 27 countries in Europe and 48 countries worldwide. The company, formed on July 22, 2008, by the merger of Gaz de France and Suez, traces its origins to the Universal Suez Canal Company founded in 1858 to construct the Suez Canal. As of 2022, Engie employed 96,454 people worldwide with revenues of €93.86 billion.

Engie is listed on the Euronext exchanges in Paris and Brussels and is a constituent of the CAC 40 index. The company was headed from 2016 to 2020 by Isabelle Kocher, who significantly transformed it, notably by deciding to exit coal activities and by investing in renewable energy and energy transition services. Despite the company's commitment to diversification, the majority of its primary activities still revolve around fossil fuels.

Prior to the GDF Suez merger plans in 2006, the company existed as two separate French multinational corporations – Suez S.A. and Gaz de France.

Suez was (and still remains, through GDF Suez) one of the oldest continuously existing multinational corporations in the world as the result of nearly two centuries of reorganisation and corporate mergers. Its corporate history dates back to the 1822 founded Algemeene Nederlandsche Maatschappij ter begunstiging van de volksvlijt (literally: General Dutch Company for the favouring of industry) by King William I of the Netherlands (see Société Générale de Belgique). The origin of its name 'Suez' traces back to its other founding entity – the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez founded in 1858 to build the Suez Canal. Suez S.A. was the result of a 1997 merger between the Compagnie de Suez and Lyonnaise des Eaux [fr].

Gaz de France was created in 1946 along with its sister company Électricité de France (EDF) by the French Government. After the liberalisation of Europe's energy markets, Gaz de France also entered into the electricity sector, having developed combined natural gas-electricity offerings. The company's capital was partially floated on the Paris Stock Exchange in July 2005, raising €2.5 billion for the French Government.

On 25 February 2006, French Prime minister Dominique de Villepin announced the merger of water supply and treatment, waste management and energy company Suez and power firm Gaz de France, with the aim of creating the world's largest liquefied natural gas company. Since the French state owned over 80% of Gaz de France, it was necessary to pass a new law in order to make the merger possible. Whilst Nicolas Sarkozy was for several months opposed to the Villepin government's plans for a merger of the two companies, preferring a three-way deal with Italy's Enel which would maintain a controlling stake for the state, he subsequently accepted the government proposal.

The plan for a merger between Gaz de France and Suez came under fire from the whole of the political left, which feared the loss of one of the last ways of preventing the price rises experienced over the previous three years, and by the social Gaullists and trade unions. In August 2006, the left-wing opposition submitted a record-breaking 137,449 amendments to the proposed legislation. Under normal procedure, parliament would have been required to vote on the amendments, which would have taken 10 years. The French Constitution does give the government options to bypass such a filibuster, but in the end these were not used.