We talk about industry with Olivier Lluansi, teacher at the Ecole des Mines, former delegate to the Territories of Industry. In 2023, the Ministry of the Economy entrusted it with a mission on reindustrialization. His conclusions released in April were not made public, so he made a book about them, Reindustrializing, the challenge of a generationpublished by La Déviation.
franceinfo : Do you know why your report on reindustrialization has not been released?
Olivier Lluansi: First of all, it’s a report that we wrote somewhat collectively. Even though I held the pen, I was surrounded by around twenty personalities, industrialists, local and regional elected officials, a sociologist, a philosopher. It’s a collective reflection. And when we ask independent people for an independent mission, it can happen that what we highlight is not entirely pleasing. And maybe that’s what happened. I couldn’t confirm it, but that’s what I imagine.
Are you saying that promising an industry at 15% of GDP in 2035 is not tenable and that we need to be more realistic?
In fact, we promised 15% of industry in 2035. 15% is the European average. It is not an objective which, in the long term, is indecent. On the contrary, it must be kept for the long term. Today, we are at 10%. And what we are saying is that in 10 years, we can catch up maybe half of the way. In any case, we are ambitious but realistic. But we will not reach the European average for fairly simple reasons: we do not have enough carbon-free electricity, we will need a lot of land and we have constrained ourselves, with the principle of zero net artificialization. And then we would have to train many more people than we are capable of training today in industrial professions.
So if we aim for 12%, 13%, is it doable?
This is exactly the conclusion we reached. Except that 12% or 13%, I don’t know if that speaks to many people, so we tried to express it differently. It is said that by 2035, we could have a balanced trade balance in goods, that is to say that France would sell abroad as many manufactured goods as it buys. Today, we have -60 billion and in recent years, we have oscillated, excluding Covid periods which were terrible, between -60 and -100 billion. It still shows the level of ambition that we set with this objective.
Where is it, concretely? Have we stemmed deindustrialization?
Yes, we stemmed deindustrialization roughly from 2009. But since 2009, Sarkozy presidency, general states of industry, we have had the Welsh report, the Montebourg plans, France Relance, France 2030, lots of tools policies that promised to reindustrialize us. And the observation that we can make, if we talk in terms of GDP, which is one of the indicators, we are flat, even a little downward. We have created industrial jobs, 20,000 per year for example over the last few years; we would have had to do at least three times more to be on a real reindustrialization trajectory. So we are in a sort of false flat, a decade of stabilization which must now be transformed.
“After a decade of stabilization, we must transform the experiment and enter into a real trajectory of reindustrialization.”
Olivier Lluansi, teacher at the School of Minesat franceinfo
How do we do this while making this reindustrialization compatible with environmental issues?
Very clearly, there will be no reindustrialization if it does not fit into our environmental trajectory. That’s a certainty. We do not reindustrialize for the sake of reindustrializing, to plant factories, we reindustrialize for three reasons: reduce our environmental footprint (50% of our carbon footprint is imported), gain sovereignty, and create territorial cohesion, with good jobs and added value. These are the goals of reindustrialization. Afterwards, how to do it is another aspect that we put forward in this mission, and which shifts a little from the speech we heard before. We say that new sectors, start-ups, gigafactories, are necessary, this is how we will move on to the new generation. But that only represents a third of our potential to reindustrialize.
Disruptive sectors are good, but we must not forget what already exists.
Exactly. And the other two thirds are in fact the projects of SMEs and ETIs which are anchored in our territories. If they managed to do all the projects they have in their boxes, we would be two-thirds of the way there. And we have forgotten them a little by the side of the road. We helped them much less. We did it during France Relance, but since then, we have focused communication on start-ups, gigafactories and public resources.
“Start-ups and gigafactories are essential for the future, but they are not the ones who will do all of our reindustrialization, they will not be enough. We must help SMEs.”
Olivier Lluansi, teacher at the School of Minesat franceinfo
We talk a lot about “made in France”, but in reality, do public policies and public procurement follow?
“Made in France” is essential. We don’t produce to produce, we produce to sell. So a product made in France must find its purchase, it must find the buyer. And the observation we made was that our public order was less patriotic than us, French consumers. When the State buys goods produced in France, it buys proportionally less than you and me. What is still a bit paradoxical and what we have highlighted is that if our public buyers, our public order were as patriotic as that of Germany, we would make 15 billion euros in addition to “made in France”. This figure of 15 billion euros is high, but it is a quarter of our trade deficit. With this lever, we would reduce our trade deficit by a quarter, which we propose to reduce to zero in 2035. This lever is therefore up to the challenge and it is not fully used.
A very urgent file on the table of the new government is that of the budget. Faced with the state of public finances, the question of tax increases arises, particularly for large companies. What is your view on this question?
We say that our reindustrialization is a priority, because it is a necessity for financing our social system, for our social project. Taking into account the current context, I would say quite simply, do not add to what industrial companies already pay.
“We have a problem with tax competitiveness compared to Germany and Italy. So don’t be heavy-handed with tax increases.”
Olivier Lluans, teacher at the School of Minesat franceinfo
By increasing the costs of businesses too much, we will stop all the efforts we have made over the past decade, if we go in that direction.
This new government has a delegate minister responsible for industry, Marc Ferracci. Do you have a message for him?
I have two and I have already introduced them to you a little. The first is to give us an ambitious but realistic collective objective. Having a political objective is essential because it mobilizes the entire nation. But if we say we’re going to go to Mars when we’re not able to land on the moon, at some point, it’s disappointing. And then the second point is to rebalance our efforts to promote the development of the existing industrial fabric, to keep and develop what we have, before reinventing something we don’t yet have. We must do it, we must try, but let us already rely on our strengths.