There is nothing Franck Riboud likes quite so much as to be in the crowd at a football match.

"A stadium with 50,000 people is a wonderful thing," says the tousle-haired chairman and chief executive of Danone. "I love to be part of the fete."

Understandable for a self-confessed sports fanatic who has just joined the board of Paris St Germain, one of France's leading soccer clubs. But not what one would expect from a French business chief who delights in standing out from the crowd with his commitment to Anglo-Saxon concepts such as shareholder value.

Yet Mr Riboud sees no difference between playing the sports he loves and running a large consumer company on behalf of the shareholders. Whatever you do, you should aim to be in the top team - and that means outrunning the competition using all the weapons available to you.

"Better a good garagiste [mechanic] than a bad bachelier [high-school graduate]," as his father Antoine, who founded Danone 30 years ago, used to say.

"It didn't matter so much if I didn't do well in class," says Mr Riboud. "But with football or skiing or tennis, my father always said you were wasting your time if you weren't in the best team."

Shareholder value has certainly helped Danone pull away from its competitors in the two-and-a-half years since Mr Riboud succeeded his father at the helm. The group, once a sprawling food conglomerate, has been dramatically transformed into a business which focuses on dairy products, biscuits and water.

Low-margin businesses such as grocery and confectionery, which accounted for more than 10 per cent of sales, have been sold. The BSN glass container division - the original Danone business - has been pooled in a joint venture with Gerresheimer of Germany for stockmarket flotation in the future.

The group has bought back shares, jumped over the necessary corporate governance hurdles for a Wall Street listing and adopted return-on-capital targets to measure performance. The reward has been a doubling of the share price since Mr Riboud unveiled his restructuring in May 1997 - a stock-market reassessment that has catapulted Danone into the league of giants that includes Unilever and Nestle.

Mr Riboud says his strategy is very simple: "We asked ourselves how we could match those companies two or three times bigger than us while competing with specialists half our size, such as Kellogg's or Barilla. We decided to refocus on products where we have leading positions with the greatest growth potential."

In fresh dairy products, such as yoghurts, Danone has 15 per cent of a global market valued at $37 billion (#31.36 billion) and there are no close contenders for the title of the world's biggest yoghurt maker. Its share of the $34 billion biscuit market, at 8 per cent, is far ahead of Nabisco, the number two.

In bottled water, Evian and the rest of the group's stable have more than 10 per cent of the $21 billion global market, coming second only to Nestle. Danone has recently boosted its position in the US market by buying Aquapenn, which should produce cost savings as the two businesses are merged and take it into third place.

"The bottled water market is growing at 15 per cent a year," says Mr Riboud. "The potential is huge - western Europeans drink around 100 litres a year, while Americans drink 15.

"If you have the brands and the strategy, you can imagine everyone could drink the same amount (in the US) as in Europe. There is the same potential in biscuits. And in dairy products, we have 15 per cent of the global market but we get that from just 8 per cent of the world's population."

He also expects to gain market share from the growth in consumption of branded products.

"Look at India, where the market for biscuits is one million tonnes a year, of which 360,000 tonnes is branded. Our share of the branded segment is 39 per cent, but every day of every year consumers with growing buying power switch from bulk products to branded packs."

Danone, the brand, already has sales of Ffr25 billion (#3.8 billion) a year, making it one of the world's largest in food. The group's top five brands account for more than half the Ffr90 billion annual sales.

"The brand strategy is clear: as few brands as possible with maximum turnover behind them. That allows you to maximise advertising spending, new product development and research."

The faster growth in branded products in emerging markets is behind another of Mr Riboud's targets: to raise sales outside western Europe from around 5 per cent of the total in 1992 to a third by 2000. Today, it has reached 24 per cent, helped by acquisitions such as Acqua, Asia's largest water business, and Delicja, the leading biscuit-maker in Poland.

The disposals are largely over, he says, if only because selling any of the remaining businesses at current interest rates is likely to dilute earnings. That applies particularly to Danone's brewing operation: Kronenbourg in France has more than half the market, while San Miguel is the leader in Spain with almost a third of market share.

"This is a very good business in terms of cashflow. It creates value for the shareholders," Mr Riboud enthuses.

"I have the leading brands in France and Spain and no one can touch me in those countries. Within two or three years, there may be some consolidation in the European brewing industry and we will have two beautiful tickets for that.

"It is not for sale," he adds emphatically.

At 43, Mr Riboud has emerged from his father's shadow. He evidently gets great enjoyment out of running a business he says he never intended to join.

After graduating as an engineer, his intention was to pursue his love of sports by working for Rossignol, the ski manufacturer, in the US.

He had spent a year wind-surfing with France's world championship team and decided to get some business experience with Danone's Panzani pasta subsidiary while waiting for his green card. The North American snows failed two years in succession, Rossignol closed its US factory and Mr Riboud decided to stay with the family company.

"I started as a sales representative without any idea of becoming chairman. I just did my job step by step as a good rep and a good manager.

"My father never told me I was going to be chairman - that was never his idea. The first time he discussed it with me was when I was running the Evian company in 1992, four years before I became chairman.

"I was born in the right place and I have been very lucky but if I had not been the right man for the job, I would not have got it."

Looking ahead, Mr Riboud sees his main challenge being to keep Danone evolving and to stay ahead of the competition.