Yahoo Finance Macron Touts €15 Billion of Overseas Investments in France
(Bloomberg) -- Emmanuel Macron unveiled more than €15 billion ($16.2 billion) in foreign investments from Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Morgan Stanley on Monday to spur France’s economy, repair its public finances and establish Paris as Europe’s post-Brexit financial hub.
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The projects were announced at the annual “Choose France” summit, which will bring together 180 executives at the Château de Versailles. The event, now in its seventh year, is a key part of Macron’s push to re-industrialize the country and attract more foreign investment after a long period of economic decline.
The total investment of the 56 projects, which also include AstraZeneca, Equinix, IBM and low-carbon fertilizer producer FertigHy, exceed last year’s €13 billion, the Elysee said on Sunday.
The summit comes at a difficult moment for France’s economy, which is emerging from a bruising period of near stagnation and high inflation. While growth picked up at the start of the year, weaker output has already undermined Macron’s objective of returning the country to full employment and reducing the gaping budget deficit after the Covid pandemic and energy crisis. TotalEnergies SE Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne also spooked the government last month by saying that he may move his company’s primary listing to New York.
Even so, foreign investment has been a relative bright spot. While the number of projects declined last year in France, the country remains the main destination for global investors in Europe, according to EY’s ranking.
Other announcements include Amazon’s plan to spend €1.2 billion on reinforcing logistics and computing capacities, particularly in terms of its cloud division AWS and AI resources. That effort is expected to produce around 3,000 additional jobs. In the pharma sector, Pfizer will reinvest €500 million in the country, while AstraZeneca will spend about €365 million in the Dunkirk region.
Microsoft plans to spend €4 billion to build cloud and AI infrastructure in France, the company said in a statement, with the aim of training a million people and supporting 2,500 startups by 2027. Earlier this year, the company unveiled a partnership and a €15 million investment in Mistral AI, a Parisian startup competing with OpenAI.
Morgan Stanley is expanding its European campus in the French capital through its global research hub, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Saturday. Since 2021, the US bank has increased its headcount in Paris from 150 to about 400. It will add 100 staffers across all its Paris divisions, including the R&D center, which has 90 employees now and could grow to 120, according to a Morgan Stanley spokesperson.
First Abu Dhabi Bank and Nigeria’s Zenith Bank are also set to open offices in Paris. Those operations will help French companies invest in the Gulf and in English-speaking Africa, and show that Paris is becoming a key location for worldwide players, according to Le Maire.
Paris in recent years has grown as a financial center, attracting banks and hedge funds seeking an EU foothold in the wake of Brexit. The 2016 UK vote to leave the EU forced Wall Street’s biggest banks to adjust operations and ensure they were trading European assets — such as government bonds, interest rate products and equities — within the bloc’s remaining 27 countries.
But as the flow from London to Paris has slowed recently, the French government has made efforts to bolster Paris’s attractiveness as a European financial center by addressing the country’s reputation for having tight labor laws, excessive regulation, and for putting political pressure on companies.
Le Maire will host a lunch on Monday with top bankers including JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon, KKR co-founder Henry Kravis, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and Bank of America head Brian Moynihan.
Other investments previewed by the finance minister include two factories to help make France a “decarbonized industry” leader. Swiss-based KL1 is set to invest €300 million in a nickel refining plant — a key component for electric vehicle batteries — with 200 employees in Blanquefort, near Bordeaux.
The German start-up Lilium will build a €400 million factory assembling vertical take-off electrical jets in the southwest of France, creating as many as 850 jobs, Le Maire said.
The European consortium FertigHy plans to invest €1.3 billion in a plant in the north of France by 2030 to produce low-carbon nitrogen fertilizer, industry minister Roland Lescure said in an interview with La Tribune on Sunday. Belgian chemicals group Solvay is expected to launch a rare earths production unit at its La Rochelle site for a €100 million cost, he added.
--With assistance from Mark Bergen.
(Update with context throughout)
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