Their number has remained stable in recent years: France was home to 271 drug production sites in 2022, according to the report from Leem, the union of drug companies. This figure includes 71 locations dedicated to subcontracting and has remained the same for five years. Île-de-France and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, which include the metropolises of Paris and Lyon, are the regions that are home to the most. In the long term, a Senate report from July 2023 highlights, despite everything, a decline in the number of companies in the pharmaceutical industry since 1980, linked to site closures.
Among these production sites, those of Lisieux (Calvados) and Compiègne (Oise), where Doliprane is manufactured, have however been the subject of increased attention in recent days, after the announcement of the sale to an American fund, by Sanofi, from its over-the-counter product subsidiary Opella, which oversees around a hundred brands including this drug.
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2,106,000 jobs, fragile increase
The pharmaceutical industry totaled 135,500 jobs at the end of 2022, according to the statistical service of the Ministry of Labor. For comparison, there are 108,000 jobs in the hairdressing sector, 198,000 in the real estate sector. This figure includes all jobs in the professional sector, including those in head offices or subsidiaries with specific activities. More precisely, 106,000 people were directly employed by pharmaceutical companies in 2022, according to Leem, of which 16,000 were hired in 2024. There are 1,341 jobs in Brittany, where a Sanofi production site is located. in Ploërmel (Morbihan).
This number of jobs in France has been increasing since 2020, after a marked decline between 2007 and 2013. Despite everything, cuts are still regularly announced. In 2022, 13 departure plans were identified by Leem, concerning 2,000 jobs.
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3 5th European producer, in decline
France has the fifth largest pharmaceutical production in Europe, at 23.5 billion euros in 2021, behind Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. This high ranking, symbol of the importance of the pharmaceutical sector for France, also hides a change in status over the years: the country ranked first, fifteen years earlier. “Within the European Union, France is increasingly competing with its neighbors in the field of production,” underlines Leem. This strong competition is an argument put forward by laboratories to explain certain production choices.
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4 30% domestic production, down
“As a result of the relocation of pharmaceutical production, the share of medicines produced on French territory today does not exceed a third”, notes a Senate report from 2023. This overall share of 30% reveals certain trends, in its detail : this “domestic production rate is lower for drugs that have entered the market since 2004” as well as “for more innovative and higher cost drugs”, such as monoclonal antibodies.
This context is important: Sanofi notably announced the sale of the subsidiary responsible for the production of Doliprane, a year ago, in order to accelerate innovation and position itself as a champion of immunology. French production is today more focused on products that have been authorized for a long time and rather little towards the industrial production of medicines created from living organisms (bioproduction), which are more innovative, and not by a chemical process.
