With more than 260,000 companies and 3 million employees, France ranks seventh in the world in manufacturing output, with industrial exports accounting for around 80% of the country’s total exports. And yet competition is intensifying in technology, talent and industrial sovereignty. After decades of deindustrialisation, manufacturing’s share of GDP hit a low of around 10% in the early 2020s before beginning to recover, driven by reshoring and large-scale investment. This stabilisation is encouraging, but insufficient. In a fast-shifting technological environment, the companies that pull ahead are those that can accelerate their transformation through corporate transactions.
In 2026, two sectors are capturing most of the M&A activity: digital, in a consolidation phase, and breakthrough industrial technologies, looking for structural financing.
Digital: consolidating to stay competitive
The French digital market is expected to reach 74.3 billion euros in 2026, up 4.3% after moderate growth in 2025 (+2%). The recovery is real, but uneven: software vendors and platforms are surging by 8.4% to 31.6 billion euros, while IT services firms post a modest +1.4% at 35 billion euros. This divide is not just a passing phase: it reflects a reshaping of the sector around generative AI, data sovereignty and cybersecurity, which is shifting value towards the players able to industrialise these technologies at scale.
This momentum rests on infrastructure that is being rapidly reshaped. In 2025, France became the top destination for foreign investment in data centre construction, ahead of the United States, according to UNCTAD. The Choose France summit of 1 June 2026 confirmed this positioning: of the 93 billion euros announced, data centres and AI infrastructure are the top category, with SoftBank (45 billion euros in the Hauts-de-France), Brookfield (30 billion), Microsoft (4.3 billion) and AWS (7.8 billion). For French digital players, this rollout creates structural demand for engineering and managed services, which in turn raises the pressure to consolidate to meet it at scale.
Beyond infrastructure, the entire digital services market is being restructured through external growth. SPIE ICS’s integration of Artemys in April 2026 illustrates this: 420 employees specialised in IT transformation, cloud, data and cybersecurity, with established positions in financial services and luxury. SPIE ICS crosses the 3,600-employee mark and enhances its AI offering, combining its secure generative AI Hub with Artemys’s tighter integration into business processes.
Breakthrough technologies: financing industrialisation through consortiums
Entire industries, including fourth-generation nuclear, green hydrogen and critical materials, require considerable investment over ten to fifteen-year cycles, structurally out of reach for any single player. The France 2030 plan is mobilising 54 billion euros to support this transformation, of which 1.2 billion is earmarked for nuclear. The results are starting to materialise: more than 250 industrial sites created or relocated to France since launch, around 80,000 direct and indirect jobs generated, and industrial R&D spending reaching 35 billion euros a year, or 60% of the country’s total research effort.
But public funding alone does not cover these trajectories. The model that is taking hold combines non-dilutive grants, venture capital and industrial investors within consortiums where each stakeholder brings as much strategic validation as capital. Otrera New Energy’s 17 million euro round in May 2026 is a textbook case: nine French industrial shareholders, EDF, Groupe ADF, Ingerop, Onet Technologies, SNEF, Groupe REEL, Fortil Group, Normandie Participations and Exergon, gathered around a deeptech specialised in sodium-cooled fast reactors. EDF’s entry, the group’s first return to sodium-cooled reactor technology since 2019, goes well beyond its financial weight: it is a technological endorsement that gives the entire programme credibility in the eyes of the market.
This trend reflects a structural shift in the way industrial players approach innovation. They are no longer positioning themselves only as customers of emerging technologies, but as active partners in their development, sharing risk, securing preferential access to strategic innovations, and building tomorrow’s industrial ecosystems before the markets even mature.
Competitiveness is built upstream
French reindustrialisation is moving forward, but it is now being decided less on the factory floor than in the boardroom. The companies structuring their competitiveness for the next five years are not doing so only through capital expenditure; they are doing so by choosing the right partners, taking stakes in the right technologies, and using M&A as a fully-fledged strategic positioning tool. In an environment where innovation cycles are accelerating, waiting until you need a technology to take an interest in it already means falling behind.
