Over the years, it has become France's "mini Davos," a must-attend event for many of the world's top business leaders. For its seventh edition, on Monday, May 13, the Choose France summit will take place under the gilded splendor of the Château de Versailles. Chaired by French President Emmanuel Macron, this "pro-business" event was launched in 2018 with the aim of attracting foreign investors by extolling France's economic and tax virtues.
In 2023, 28 investment projects were announced, totaling €13 billion, a record since the forum's inception. 12 months later, in this Olympic year, the Elysée has promised even better results, with over €15 billion due to be invested in 56 new projects.
The Versailles event comes at a time when France has just been named Europe's most attractive country for foreign investment for the fifth year running, ahead of the UK and Germany, according to the auditing firm EY. The French government wants to see these results as proof of the soundness of the business-friendly policies it has been pursuing since 2017: reforming the labor code, abolishing the solidarity tax on wealth (excluding real estate), lower corporate and production taxes, etc.
According to the Elysée, this has been part of the country's reindustrialization strategy. "France is reindustrializing and remains highly innovative, because our policy since 2017 has been the same, stable and comprehensible," said the French president.
This rhetoric is unlikely to change on Monday, as the government looks to move ever faster in this area: The "green industry" law, which was introduced in autumn 2023, and the new bill on regulatory simplification, presented in April, include plans to simplify legal procedures and reduce administrative delays to find available industrial land and allow factories and mines to be opened.
In addition to some 60 French business leaders, some 180 heads of foreign groups are expected at Versailles on Monday, 20% of which will be from north America and 20% from Asia, according to the Elysée. They will have lunch with French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal – a first in seven years for a prime minister – accompanied by numerous ministers and Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market. Macron, meanwhile, will be present for the dinner which is to be held in Versailles' famous Hall of Mirrors. Before this, Macron will chair a round table on decarbonization and another on artificial intelligence.
As in previous years, the president will have one-on-one meetings with the heads of four foreign groups: Switzerland's Novartis, British-Swedish group AstraZeneca, ArcelorMittal from India and SVolt, a Chinese manufacturer of electric batteries. On Monday morning, before heading to Versailles, Macron was also scheduled to visit a plant, in eastern France, owned by the major Canadian food group McCain, which has planned to decarbonize its production lines for frozen French fries.
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