We can't protect our businesses without a dynamic ecosystem

This week in the France database, we recorded the change of shareholder at RECIF Technologies, which produces robots for the microelectronics sector. The company has just been sold to a Singapore-based group.

👉 S ee the file on our database

In itself, it's neither good nor bad for a company to change shareholders, or even for it to be bought out by a foreign shareholder. However, Recif's business is part of two of today's strategic sectors: microelectronics and robotics. It is therefore regrettable that it was not able to continue its development independently, or that it was not taken over by a French group.

Digging a little deeper into the subject, an article in L'Usine Nouvelle in 2021 gave the floor to Recif's CEO at the time, who mentioned that"we generate 90% of our sales in Asia and only 3% in Europe. The remaining 7% comes from the North American market." Not surprising, then, that the buyer should be an Asian company, since the ecosystem there is more developed than in France or even Europe.

We linked this observation to a remark we read about recently announced gigafactories , which would be"filled with Chinese machines". That's probably true to a large extent. But if we want to reposition ourselves in these sectors, we need to prime the pump.

Gigafactories are already anchoring direct employment linked to final assembly in France. Indirect jobs will come later - and of course the sooner the better. We can envisage measures to enable potential subcontractors in France, who are not strong enough or large enough to supply, to grow more rapidly.

We should therefore not conclude from the fact that gigafactories are, more or less, filled with foreign machines - at least during their initial commissioning - that we should lose interest in the subject, and that it would have been just as well if these factories had been set up elsewhere. We'd lose all hope of reviving the industry and the ecosystem that goes with it. This is the only way to ensure that medium-sized domestic players are more often taken over by other domestic players.