Sanofi wants to turn the page on nearly a century of presence in this town in the south of the inner suburbs. The French pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry giant aims to leave its 52,000 square meter campus in Gentilly (94), which it has occupied since 2016.
While Sanofi management had already distanced itself from its teams by establishing itself in 2022 a stone's throw from the Arc de Triomphe, along avenue de la Grande-Armée, the group wishes to bring to La Défense nearly 3,000 employees (sales departments, Manufacturing & Supply departments, corporate functions, etc.) out of the 3,700 currently present in Gentilly. The rest of the staff (Research and Development) should join the Vitry-sur-Seine site (Val-de-Marne), where R&D is already established.
If Sanofi's lease with the insurer MACSF runs until 2030, a clause allows the laboratory to get rid of it without penalty from 2027. An opportunity that Sanofi intends to seize to leave Gentilly. The group has therefore set its sights on the CB3 building in La Défense.
But until then, the former Technip headquarters, built at the end of the 1970s and having housed Société Générale services until 2016, will have to be modernized. A first restructuring project with an enhancement of the building was envisaged by AEW Europe before being aborted in the middle of a pandemic. Since then, the asset has been bought by Icawood, which is planning a major renovation – without adding new floors – in order to transform CB3 into a building with a low carbon footprint.
Completely restructured, the building, reinvented by the Ateliers 2/3/4/ agency, will offer a tertiary surface area of approximately 33,000 square meters (34,400 square meters in total) revolving around a vast patio. The seven-level building will offer its occupants the usual services, with restaurants, a fitness area and a large auditorium. The current glass and metal facade will give way to a cladding mixing glass and wood. At its summit, CB3 will offer a rooftop accompanied by a catering offer. A large commercial cell of 1,450 square meters directly accessible from the forecourt will also complete the ensemble.
A program which therefore convinced Sanofi to install its teams there at the end of the work, by 2027. If Courbevoie, where CB3 is located, can look forward to welcoming Sanofi in the coming years, Gentilly deplores this planned departure, but not yet definitively acted upon. The communist mayor, Fatah Aggoune, did not hesitate to speak of “betrayal” on the part of Sanofi. “Many public investments in our territory in terms of development or even public transport have also been made taking into account these needs [ceux de Sanofi] », protests the city. And for the councilor, “the economic future of [notre] region, it is not to concentrate all the wealth and economic activity in a single place, to the west of Paris. With this departure, the city should lose an important fiscal resource.
A project to transfer offices to La Défense that the CFDT does not understand. “We are very angry. We don’t understand why we have to move,” annoys Laurence Titeux, elected CSE at the CFDT, denouncing a new change in the group’s strategy. Because, as always with this type of move, among employees there are losers and winners in terms of transportation time. To date, Sanofi management has not yet carried out an impact study, according to the CFDT.
Contacted, Sanofi confirms this relocation project in order to “offer optimal working conditions” to its employees. If Sanofi is going to offload its subsidiary Opella, known for Doliprane, the group wants to be reassuring by affirming that its real estate reorganization will have “no impact on the number of positions within each of the activities and sites concerned” and does not hide therefore not yet another social plan.
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