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Economics: The battle for France’s industrial jewel

France’s manufacturing giant Alstom is set to be swallowed by General Electric, how about a ‘Franco-French’ solution? asks TOM GILL

While the fear of a US takeover of British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has dominated headlines in Britain, across the channel a very similar threat is facing one of France’s leading national companies.

France has been in a state of shock since it was revealed last week the company that built the high speed TGV train and steam turbines for EDF nuclear reactors was about to be taken over by the Yankees. Things scarcely improved when a desperate Paris sought to bring in the Germans for an alternative bid over the weekend.

Alstom is one of France’s largest private sector employers and seen as central to the country maintaining its position among the world’s major manufacturing powers. That its fate is in the hands of two foreign engineering giants, General Electric and Siemens, is seen as another blow to French pride. It comes amid a string of high-profile company closures and record 10 per cent unemployment.

It is particularly embarrassing for the unpopular French socialist administration, when the previous right-wing government of President Nicolas Sarkozy warded off foreign predators with a multibillion-euro bailout and temporary nationalisation of Alstom.

Try as they might, President Francois Hollande and his Industry minister Arnaud Montebourg are struggling to show the administration’s patriotic colours. To be sure, Montebourg was responsible for seeing off Yahoo’s bid in April last year to buy French video site Dailymotion, arguing that he would not let the country sell off one of its top startups.

But the socialists’ record over the past two years is mixed. For example, on the campaign trail in 2012 they pledged to keep the blast furnaces going at the Florange steelworks in north-eastern France after Indian multinational Tata pulled the plug, only to let them shut.

Montebourg objected on Monday to the possibility that Alstom “can decide to sell 75 per cent of a national jewel behind the backs of the employees, of the government, of most of the board and of the senior executives.”

The bid from General Electric raised a simple problem that “the main part of Alstom, 75 per cent of the businesses, 65,000 employees in the world, is going to be run from Connecticut.”

The government’s aim is reportedly to keep Alstom’s decision-making centre in France and protect jobs and strategic energy interests. But so far, their only solution was to bring in the Germans and to try to flog the plan as an Airbus-style “European” project. This might have worked in the past but is less likely to get a sympathetic hearing in the current eurosceptic climate where Germany is rightly accused of imposing misery on fellow Europeans.

For General Electric, it seems, this is an opportunity to expand in Europe and retreat from its none-too-successful transformation from a real economy engineering firm to a Fortune 100 “diversified financial” company that invested in the sub-prime market and got its fingers burnt. For Siemens, it is about wiping out the competition and above all blocking the US giant’s ambitions.

But how bad is it for Alstom and does it really need rescuing? The newspapers variously report that the company is “coming under pressure because its main markets for power generation and rail equipment are expected to be weak in the next few years,” that its debts are mounting and that it is too small to survive alongside giants such as GE and Siemens.

Unions point out that Alstom’s problems are much overplayed. Its order books amount to 56 billion euros, a record. In its transport division this amounts to five years’ worth of work.

For his part, in a tweet this week, former left presidential candidate Jean Luc Melenchon identified some more fundamental problems — the “cost of capital, austerity and neoliberalism.”

Let’s examine the substance of his tweet.

Cost of capital: Over the past four years 1.5 billion euros has been handed out to shareholders in dividends, according to unions. Compare that to 2.3 billion euros of debts, which could be substantially lower if the fat cat owners had less cream. The biggest shareholder of all — Martin Bouygues, the billionaire chairman of family conglomerate Bouygues, with a 29.4 per cent stake – wants to sell its share to spend some money on what today are considered more lucrative ventures, perhaps telecoms. A capitalist captain of French industry who wants to bail out, heading for what he hopes are calmer waters, leaving behind him his ship and crew with a gaping hole in the hull.

Austerity: Alstom’s orders are heavily reliant on public procurement, and in particular the French state. But cuts in budgets due to the financial crisis and its austerity response and the longer-term EU budget straitjacket have had their impact. These same policies of course are the ones hurting the public finances and so are stopping the government pursuing the option unions support – nationalisation.

Neo-liberalism: in some respects Alstom will have benefited from freer trade and greater global competition, for example orders for plant from key client EDF, now one of Europe’s largest energy companies. But greater competition has put the company under intense pressure from exactly the types of global companies that want to gobble it up. The Sarkozy rescue reportedly only got past EU competition chiefs on condition work was handed out to competitors, resulting in thousands of French job losses.

Pro-market policies since the early 1980s, as well as driving concentration of ownership into ever fewer hands, have made a “dirigiste” industrial policy increasingly difficult.

Hollande needs not to forget the lessons of France’s relatively successful fight against globalisation which has left the country not only with a world-beating rail system but with a volume car industry led by Peugeot and (whatever you think of nuclear) a formidable energy sector, as well as a rapidly growing green energy industry, led by companies like Alstom.

These are sectors which provide the kind of high-skilled, high-paid jobs that underpin any prosperous nation.

So will it be a US takeover, a Franco-German solution or, as one trade union leader suggested, a “Franco-French” future for Alstom? The latest twist in what one French newspaper has called a “national psychodrama” is that Alstom has accepted General Electric’s $17 billion offer to buy its energy division, despite government protestations.

An apparent concession to ministerial pressure is that Alstom is said to still be prepared to consider a counter-bid from Siemens. In the meantime, an independent committee will scrutinise the preferred bid from the US conglomerate and will report back at the end of next month.

Unions remain fearful that either proposed solution means big job losses and a break-up of the group. Christian Garnier, a CGT union rep at the company, says: “Whether the predator is American or German, we do not want either because in both cases it leads to the collapse and disappearance of the [Alstom] group. Siemens wants to eliminate a competitor. General Electric wants to get patents, know-how, the order book and industrial facilities ... Whatever the buyer, there will be job losses and closures.

“The true explanation of the proposed sale is that the largest shareholder Bouygues wants to make a capital gain by selling shares. We are being sacrificed for finance. We want the nationalisation of the company. We want the state to stop its rhetoric and take action.”

Melenchon and his communist allies, who remain influential in parts of the trade union movement, see a state-led “energy and transport pole” as “the only guarantee of industrial independence for France”. This could be achieved, they suggest, by state-controlled train company SNCF, metro operator RATP, energy giant EDF and nuclear group AREVA buying shares in Alstom as part of “new strategic co-operation agreements that are industrially, financially and employment-friendly, as well as being socially useful.”

This is a plan that will no doubt fall foul of EU state-aid rules, and other economic orthodoxies of the day, but it’s the best potential solution for France’s future as a manufacturing nation.

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