At the end of the seventh edition of the Choose France summit, the high point of foreign investment in France, 15 billion euros and more than 10,000 jobs were promised.
It’s a “record” edition, an “exceptional vintage”, the Élysée and the government boasted this Monday, May 13, as no less than 180 French and foreign business leaders gathered at the Palace of Versailles as part of of the annual Choose France meeting. At the end of this high mass of foreign investments in France, there were no less than 15 billion euros in investments, compared to barely 1.2 billion seven years ago during the very first edition, which were announced.
In addition to this impressive sum, between 8,000 and 10,000 job creations have also been announced by the executive in the years to come, reports Challenges, which lists a non-exhaustive list of positions soon to be made available to the French. The weekly magazine thus mentions the creation of around a hundred jobs in Dunkirk, in the North, in the Enchem battery component factory. Some 600 positions should also emerge thanks to the Chinese company Hunan Changyuan Lico in the Hauts-de-France region. Finally, in Alsace, the German electrical installation specialist, Hager, plans to create half a thousand jobs.
No less than 35 departments are affected by these approximately 56 investment projects and should therefore see potential job creation in their territory. Please note, however, that all these departments are in mainland France, with overseas areas once again seeming to be the big losers in this 2024 edition of Choose France. “Three quarters of the industrial projects that will be announced will concern towns with less than 20,000 inhabitants,” said Laurent Saint-Martin, general director of Business France, on France Inter on Monday morning. “These are territories that are being revitalized and industrial employment is being recreated in France,” he continued, referring, however, to “the creation and maintenance of more than 10,000 jobs.” And to congratulate himself: “We are opening more factories than we are closing, and we are hiring more industrial jobs than we are eliminating. And that is a real industrial revolution in France.”
