France secures jobs, investments from Amazon, Pfizer and Morgan Stanley

PARIS: France secured on Sunday new jobs and investments with Internet giant Amazon, healthcare company Pfizer and Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley, as the country prepared to host a key foreign investment summit.

President Emmanuel Macron kicks off the annual ‘Choose France’ event, aimed at winning big business from overseas, on Monday. The 2023 edition raised 13 billion euros ($14 billion) of foreign investment.

The French presidency said on Sunday that Amazon would announce an extra 1.2 billion euro investment in France which could create 3,000 new jobs, while healthcare companies Pfizer and AstraZeneca announced new investments worth a total of nearly $1 billion.

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire added that Morgan Stanley, which plans to raise its overall headcount in Paris to 500 by 2025, was adding 100 staff in the French capital. Macron wants to burnish Paris’ role as a top European business capital. The French economy, the euro zone’s second largest, faces pressure over its budget deficit, while its first-quarter growth was just 0.2 percent.

Paris has traditionally lagged New York and London as a global financial hub, with the closely watched Z/Yen survey published in March ranking New York as the world’s top financial centre, with London in second place. Le Maire said France and the European Union as a whole still had to do more against competition from China and the US, with French oil major TotalEnergies saying last month that it was looking at having its primary stock market listing in New York.

At an EU meeting in Brussels this week, Le Maire said he would reaffirm the need for a capital markets union to facilitate investments in new areas of the economy such as renewable energy and artificial intelligence.

“Europe needs money. If not, it will continue to lose out in terms of productivity to the United States and China.” Le Maire added that as part of the ‘Choose France’ event, he would host meetings on Monday with the CEOs of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America , among others.

“These roundtables will give us an opportunity to once again reach out to the big financial investors so they can continue to set up sites in Paris and finance the major industrial and economic projects on which we are working with the President,” said Le Maire.