On 2 March 2016, the French Council of Ministers named Philippe Schleicher as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the GIAT Industries Group and of its subsidiary Société Nationale des Poudres et Explosifs (SNPE). Under this appointment, he also becomes Chairman of Eurenco.
A Sciences Po and HEC graduate, Philippe Schleicher, aged 61, joined the Snecma Group, now Safran, in 1980. He spent the first 15 years of his career developing the carbon-carbon composite brake activity for aeronautical application, which became one of the Group's most valuable activities.
In 1995, he joined the SNPE Group as Chairman and CEO of Nobel Sport, the subsidiary specializing in hunting ammunition and propellants. In the early 2000s, he worked on taking over automated production line engineering companies in the food processing industry, through LBOs with financial partners.
He returned to work for the Safran Group in 2004 and became Managing Director of Techspace Aero, the Group's Belgian subsidiary.
In 2011, he came back to France to finalize the Herakles project which had been set up to merge the missile/rocket propulsion activities of SNPE and Safran. He was named CEO of Herakles in 2012.
GIAT Industries is the sole holding company of SNPE and holds 50% of Honosthor, a joint venture involving Nexter Systems and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, and which is now a new European leader in land defense.
SNPE, via its subsidiary Eurenco, is a leading European company specializing in propellants and explosives for civil and military use. It is the world's top producer of ethyl hexyl nitrate (EHN), a fuel additive used to improve the quality of diesel (reduced consumption and pollution).