The robot manufacturer Exotec is officially the 25th French unicorn, nickname of these start-ups valued at more than a billion dollars, as greeted by Emmanuel Macron this Monday morning before a trip in the followingnoon to Alsace devoted to investments. foreigners in France. The Elysee Palace announced on Sunday a new harvest of 21 projects totaling 4 billion euros in foreign investment, the opportunity for the Head of State and quasi-candidate for 2022 to praise his policy in favor of the attractiveness of the country.
“25 French unicorns: here we are! “, tweeted Emmanuel Macron. “This is the achievement of the objective that we set in September 2019 when we only had a handful. We were told that it was impossible and that the start-up nation, as many said, was wind,” he defends in a video. “They create hundreds of thousands of jobs” and “serve our technological sovereignty”, he insists, a notion that has become one of his favorite arguments.
The Head of State also announced “a new objective of ten tech giants by 2030 at European level” and promises to achieve this “new announcements in the coming weeks as part of the French presidency of the EU”.
Exotec’s fundraising is announced on the day of the fifth – virtual – edition of the “Choose France” summit, an event launched at the start of the five-year term for which CEOs of multinationals are usually invited to the Palace of Versailles to announce establishments in France. .
France, the leading destination for foreign investment in Europe
In total, the 21 projects announced will create “more than 10,000 jobs, to which are added more than 16,000 temporary permanent jobs” from the Manpower group, according to the Elysée, recalling that 55 of the 57 projects announced during the four previous editions materialized by 8 billion euros and 13,300 jobs.
Emmanuel Macron also confirmed this Monday the most important of them, namely the installation of a factory of the American group Eastman, with 350 jobs at stake. By 2025, it will inject 850 million euros into a plastics recycling plant, in a location to be defined. Its CEO Mark Costa is received at the Elysée on Monday morning.
Among the other projects, Pfizer will invest more than 520 million euros to produce its treatment once morest Covid-19 in France. And the German chemist BASF will inject 300 million on the Chalampé site (Haut-Rhin), where Emmanuel Macron goes Monday followingnoon in the company of the Minister Delegate for Industry Agnès Pannier-Runacher. The public aid granted to obtain these investments is generally between 5% and 10% of their amount, the same source said. France was in 2019 and 2020 the first destination for foreign investment in Europe, according to the barometer of the firm EY.
