The €93 billion in investments announced during the 9th edition of the Choose France summit sound like an undeniable PR success. But behind the euphoria of headline-grabbing numbers, a harsher macroeconomic reality is setting in: the French industrial base is sinking into a deep crisis. It is this disconnect, and the strategic choices it imposes, that we urgently need to debate, explains Antoine Gaudron, Partner, Strategy at Eight Advisory.
The Optical Illusion of the €93 Billion
Every year, Choose France delivers its share of record-breaking headlines, but the 2026 vintage demands a clear-eyed reading. The displayed figure masks a statistical reality that acts as an optical illusion: it aggregates maximum funding caps that are often highly conditional, commitments already announced and simply clarified, or extensions of plans decided several years ago.
Even more striking, the overwhelming majority of this amount is driven by digital infrastructure related to artificial intelligence. While these investments benefit some of our national champions positioned along this value chain—and will hopefully strengthen our AI sovereignty—they do not constitute productive investments in the traditional industrial sense. We are building infrastructure, not factories. The stakes regarding long-term jobs and feeding the local subcontractor network are in no way comparable, especially since the IT and network hardware equipping data centers is mostly designed by American players and manufactured in Asia.
For the vast majority of the traditional industrial landscape—metallurgy, automotive, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, luxury and consumer goods, or plastics—these spectacular announcements change nothing in an already highly strained operational equation.
Productive Investment Grinds to a Halt
Every week, the cases we handle reveal this other reality on the ground. In many sectors, demand is sluggish, if not recessionary, while production costs are rising again and inventories are piling up. Even more worrying: after a relatively positive sequence between 2015 and 2023, corporate productive investment is clearly turning downward once again. Funding for modernising industrial equipment (automation, robotics, digitalisation, energy efficiency, etc.) is driving up, freezing a structural lag behind our global competitors that we had barely begun to catch up with.
The root cause is well known: French manufacturers structurally generate less cash than their neighbours. According to Rexecode, the operating margin (EBITDA) rate of our manufacturing industry suffers from a persistent deficit of around 5 percentage points compared to the Eurozone average, even before including tax impacts. This gap translates into a chasm in terms of cash generation. Our companies have less capacity to invest and absorb shocks.
The rise in interest rates and the erosion of margins are transforming this chronic fragility into an acute emergency, the most violent symptom of which is the current wave of insolvencies: France crossed the historic threshold of 71,000 business failures over a rolling 12-month period at the end of March 2026, according to Altares.
A European Crisis Confronting the New Chinese Threat
It would be tempting, and deeply mistaken, to see this as a uniquely French issue. The domestic context is part of a European industrial crisis of unprecedented scale. Germany, the Eurozone’s historic engine, is in a deep slump: its industrial production has been falling continuously for several years, suffering another decline of nearly 5% in 2024/2025 according to Destatis. Italy is gradually following a similar trajectory.
Facing this struggling Europe, China is no longer content with flooding low-cost segments. It is aggressively moving upmarket, capturing market share in high-value-added sectors such as machine tools, advanced robotics, and renewable energies—areas where Europe still thought it possessed an untouchable competitive advantage just a few years ago.
The Forced Choice of Asian Machinery
For French industrial SMEs, which are structurally undercapitalised, the arrival of high-performing and highly affordable Asian equipment offers an opportunity to modernise production lines at a finally accessible cost. This shift to the East is often made reluctantly, but it is dictated by the strict financial necessity of restoring margins.
This pivot is all the more brutal in France because the domestic machine tool sector has virtually disappeared, historically leaving our manufacturers to source equipment from German, Swiss, or Italian manufacturers. Today, turning to Chinese competitiveness to save our factories means accelerating the fall of our traditional European suppliers, thereby weakening the economies of our closest partners.
The True Macro-Strategic Dilemma
Choose France is undeniably a necessary showcase to anchor the country in tomorrow’s globalization. But our ability to attract foreign capital cannot mask the existential dilemma facing the Old Continent.
The real question is no longer just about attracting mega-projects but knowing which path we choose for the survival of our existing production apparatus.
Should we adopt the pragmatic model of the Nordic countries and Benelux, embracing maximum openness to capitalize on Chinese technological competitiveness, safeguard the profitability of a few sectors, and ensure maximum access to international markets?
Or will we finally embrace the choice of genuine European industrial solidarity—a principle historically rejected by the Germans and Italians, but today finally put back on the table by their struggling domestic manufacturers?
In the absence of decisive choices in France and a clear political course, it is likely in Brussels, Berlin, and Rome, far from Versailles, that the future of French industry will be decided.
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