Vive La France: The French Tech Companies Taking On The World
The French tech scene is populated by huge multinational organisations, telco giants and emerging startups. Here are some of the most influential
Vivendi
Vivendi is a French multinational media conglomerate, with interests in a range of industries including music, television, video games and telecommunications.
Reported revenue for the 2016 fiscal year came in at nearly 11 billion Euros, making it one of the world’s biggest media entities.
This is thanks to Vivendi having several household name brands at its disposal. For example, it owns the French TV channel and film producer, Canal+ Group, leading music producer Universal Music Group, video game creators Ubisoft and Gameloft and video sharing platform DailyMotion.
That’s undoubtedly an impressive armoury and one that still has plenty of room for growth in the future.
Capgemini
Mixing IT consulting, outsourcing and professional services, Capgemini is a global firm based out the supposed city of love, Paris.
Raking in billions of pounds in revenue and employing around 190,000 people, Capgemin is a vast enterprise IT focussed company dating back to 1967, which provides it services to a myriad of sectors, from finance and accounting to supply chain management and cloud services.
Airbus
Famed for its civil aircraft, Airbus is based out of Blagnac in France’s Toulouse suburb and employs around 72,000 people who work on creating planes such as the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger airliner.
Staring life as a consortium of aircraft manufacturers in 1970, Airbus aircraft have preformed more than 110 million flights covering a massive 215 billion kilometres catering for the travel of 12 billion customers.
Having produced more than 10,000 aircraft, Airbus has many more flights and miles ahead of it it, though it will need to keep fending off competition from Boeing.
Technicolor
Dating back to 1893, Technicolor is a French multinational company specialising in producing products and services for the world of media.
Based out of Issy-les-Moulineaux, Technicolor is famed for its digital tools for content and audio production, combined with imaging and animation tools and services.
Starting life in the world of cinema, Technicolor had moved into areas such as games and immersive media and provides tool for both artists and scientists alike.
The French startup scene
Of course, the next big French tech firm could come from its startup ecosystem. At the recent Vive Technology conference in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of his desire to promote the country’s technology industry and offer policies that promote entrepreneurship.
Crieto and BlaBlaCar are two darlings of the French scene and there are significant amounts of investment being pumped into the sector. A recent Capgemini competition named Lili smart as the most promising GovTech and social enterprise startup and privacy firm Foxintelligence as the most promising security firm.
As part of a European network of sites, you can be sure that Silicon has its ear close the ground when it comes to the next big thing in French tech.
Roland Moore-Colyer and Sam Pudwell contributed to this article
