The JDD. Do the French still have appetite for entrepreneurship?
Nicolas Dufourcq. The figures speak for themselves. Business creations in 2024 are up 5 % compared to 2023. The French entrepreneurial index [qui mesure l’appétence des Français à entreprendre, NDLR] is constantly increasing year after year. In 2024, one in three French people participated in the entrepreneurial chain, it was considerable.
Is political instability a brake on entrepreneurship?
Instability is never good news. Even if she does not kill the desire to undertake and invest, she reduces it. According to our last indicators, one in two entrepreneur wants to continue investing in 2025. It is good, but it is ten points less than the long term average. In other words, the volume of will decreases.
In 2024, has industrial sites have been more numerous than openings, a first since 2016. Is France in the process of deindustrialisation?
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Factory openings are roughly equal to the number of closures. But this data is to be put into perspective with another fact: there is a lot of factories extensions by SMEs, ETIs or foreign groups. We have therefore not left in deindustrialisation. It’s slow, expensive, but we will go up the slope.
What does the BPI offer to rekindle our industry?
We plan to put 35 billion euros in industry over the next four years. The BPI invests in the capital of companies, grants credits and guarantees, finances innovation. It has become the first consulting company for SMEs, with 10,000 missions per year. France is aimed at bringing its industry up 10 to 12 % of GDP by 2035. A gigantic project.
“Small and medium -sized enterprises are heroic”
Should we be afraid of the economic shock promised by Trump?
-Every four years, US political staff are trying to impress us with male vociferations. They explain to us that Europe is an old lady who has understood nothing in the modern world. It’s absurd. Europe has considerable assets. Now, it’s true, being twenty-seven is a problem: our coordination costs are too high. In addition, we are older than the Americans. Their desire to invest in risk is much stronger than ours. The Draghi report offers instruments to remedy it. We bet that the new European Commission will take into account. The desire for risk must be imposed everywhere. Insurers must be allowed to invest massively in technology. The large families of European entrepreneurs must also invest themselves in the Deeptech. Is it normal that the Tables of the French Industry of Quantum Computers are mainly done with capital of the Gulf and the United States?
On February 10 and 11, Paris will host the AI summit, the area in which France is a significant delay.
The large peak Congs on AI are American or Chinese, not European. But we have a place to take in this revolution. Mistral, Poolside, Hugging Face, H, Dataiku or Dust are French companies recognized as nuggets. You have to give them their chance without giving in to a self -reading defeatism.
The boss of Bercy, Éric Lombard, decided not to hire the taxes of SMEs and craftsmen. Are you relieved?
This is excellent news! French SMEs are as much as possible their possible contribution. They already have so much to do to decarbonize their production, reinvent themselves by innovation, project themselves to export, finance their growth, sometimes fight against Chinese dumping and the harshness of the principals, put themselves at AI . Frankly, they are heroic.
The Minister of Labor, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet, suggests taxing certain retirees. Are you subscribing?
Regardless of the very particular political context of this spring, it is not heretical to say that in a country where the rate of fertility collapses at 1.62 children per woman, where the number of French people over 75 will increase From 50 % by 2030, it is likely that retirees will have to contribute to one time or another to the collective effort. Just as it is inevitable, in the long term, to have an automatic indexing diagram of retirement parameters on the increase in life expectancy. As in Italy or Portugal. When you earn several months of life expectancy per year, how do you want not to retreat the retirement age or increase the number of years of contributions necessary to liquidate at full rate?
Everything we put in denial on pensions, we do not put it in the salary of teachers, researchers, judges, nurses, in the financing of innovation, in military rearmament.
Do you approve of the idea of working seven hours more per year, as Minister Catherine Vautrin suggests?
We are the developed country which works the least, which has the most generous social benefits, which issues the biggest debt in relative: it is not tenable. It is the economy that finances the welfare state, not the other way around. For decades, she believes less quickly than social expenditure. It must be said that the more protected you are, the more you have to kiss the future by taking its risk and working. Otherwise, it doesn’t curl. I am therefore in favor of everything that allows the French to be accomplished more intensely through work.
