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June 7, 2012—For the past 40 years, big-ticket donors to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team have been rewarded with a gold medallion from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA), allowing them to access nearly all American ski resorts. This year, USSA is doing something different: It is embedding radio frequency identification in the passes. The enhanced functionality of the latest medallion is a nod to the trend of ski resorts installing high-frequency (HF) or ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID readers at their lifts.

This coming season’s Gold Pass—available to donors contributing $10,000 or more—will contain two RFID inlays enabling them to recognized by any of the readers installed at ski lifts across the United States. Until recently, an RFID tag would not get skiers very far at most resorts, since few used any technology other than bar-code scanners. But in recent years, says Kate Klingsmith, USSA’s assistant director of Gold Pass development, a sufficient number of resorts have RFID readers in place, enabling skiers to access lifts faster and easier, that USSA felt it would be a great advantage to Gold Pass holders.

In fact, approximately 30 resorts now have either HF or UHF readers installed for lift access control, point-of-sale transactions or other features for skiers, according to John Collins, the product manager at Denver technology and media company Active Network (formerly known as RTP), which provided the Gold Pass, as well as the software that stores medallion numbers and shares that information with each resort’s lift-access and ticket-window operations. The firm has provided the software service to USSA for the past decade, though this is the first year that it has also been responsible for providing the pass itself.

The Gold Pass has been a 40-year tradition, thanking U.S. Ski Team donors by authorizing access to most American ski resorts for up to 50 visits at each location for the duration of the ski season, which begins in October. Up to 400 are distributed annually, Klingsmith reports. The pass is a gold-colored medallion that a donor can wear around his or her neck or carry in a pocket, she says, adding that donors often comprise individual companies or groups that that may then share the pass with other organizations, or with their own employees or clients. For the past several decades, a bar code has been printed on the medallion’s front. When a user arrives at a resort, the facility’s staff members recognize the Gold Pass by sight, granting lift access, but they typically also record the visit—usually by scanning the bar code—in order to ensure that the number of visits does not extend beyond the allotted 50. “That’s really to be fair to the resorts,” Klingsmith explains, since none of the facilities are compensated for the visits, but rather offer the service as a favor to USSA.

Gérard Mestrallet has a fervent wish: that people stop thinking of GDF Suez as a utility.

In an interview to mark the final approval of his company’s £6.4bn payment for full ownership of Britain’s International Power, Mr Mestrallet, GDF’s chief executive, insists: “We no longer belong to that category.”

It is a surprising statement given that GDF still makes much of its profit from heavily regulated utility businesses in its home markets of France and Belgium.

But Mr Mestrallet would prefer that the company was fully recognised for the rather better growth prospects of its non-European power generation, energy services and liquefied natural gas operations, particularly in emerging markets.

This is what has encouraged him to pay a generous price for the 30 per cent of International Power that GDF does not own already, barely more than a year after it acquired 70 per cent of the British company.

In the first deal, GDF injected its non-European assets into International Power in exchange for control, creating in the process the world’s biggest independent power producer. It left the company with a separate London listing, hoping that this would showcase the growth assets owned ultimately by the parent.

But, Mr Mestrallet says, he ended up instead with “two stocks, and those investors who were wanting the benefits of growth in emerging markets were choosing International Power. In future they will have only one.”

The difficulty is that even now, with full ownership assured, the stock market will still not budge from its view of GDF as just another big European utility struggling with regulated pricing regimes. “Globally it is one of the worst markets to be in,” Mr Mestrallet says.

Even as International Power’s shareholders voted overwhelmingly in favour of GDF’s purchase on Thursday, the French company’s shares fell 1.4 per cent to €16.15 – meaning they have fallen 34 per cent in a year, roughly in line with European peers.

For Mr Mestrallet, the perceived failure by markets to recognise what makes his company different is a source of frustration. “When we first agreed to buy the other 30 per cent of International Power our shares jumped 6 per cent in two days. But since then we’ve been put back in the box of the European utilities.”

As evidence of how far he believes his company is undervalued he points to a €3bn bond issued by GDF last week, which offered 1.83 per cent of interest. By comparison the company’s shares are yielding 8.5 per cent.

He also points to GDF’s commitment to invest heavily in Asia, the Middle East and South America. Of expected annual capital spending of €9bn-€11bn in the next five years, as much as half will be spent in developing markets – up from 30 per cent now.

To pay for the International Power deal – Europe’s largest merger and acquisition transaction this year after Glencore’s $67bn purchase of Xstrata, the mining group – GDF has promised another €3bn of asset sales, on top of a €10bn disposal programme that is almost complete. But Mr Mestrallet stresses only assets in mature, largely European, markets will be sold.

He says that GDF will now concentrate on organic growth and the full integration of International Power, but he does not entirely rule out more deals. “Of course, I will never say that now the M&A period is definitely closed,” he concludes. “But we do now have the critical size and we don’t need additional operations.”