Between 2016 and 2018, companies organised in groups, the driving force behind business in France

In France, in 2018, 500 companies, most of them large multinational firms, accounted for 41% of value added and employed 34% of the workforce. These were most often French-controlled industrial or commercial multinationals. Aside from these large multinationals, the majority of companies consisted of a single legal unit: in 2018, there were 2.2 million of them in the mainly non-agricultural and non-financial market sectors (excluding micro-entrepreneurs and micro-enterprises in the tax sense). Lastly, positioned between large multinationals and single-unit legal entities, nearly 5000 mid-caps and 90,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were organised in groups of companies. Most of these SMEs consist of only a few subsidiaries.

Between 2016 and 2018, buoyed by export growth in a context of a clear recovery in world trade, the turnover of companies organised in groups rose sharply (+9.3%), while that of single-unit legal entities stagnated (-0.3%). Value added also grew although it slowed down in 2018 (+2.6% after +3.6% in 2017). The gross operating surplus (EBITDA) of companies fell by 0.7% in 2018, after rising sharply in 2017 (+4.5%). Between 2016 and 2018, the margin rate declined slightly (-0.5 points): it declined more markedly for large companies (-1.6 points), while it changed little in the other categories. Investment increased sharply in all categories of enterprises (+8.8%), but particularly in micro-enterprises (+20.5%). Net income declined (-1.6%), especially in mid-cap companies. 30% of companies reported a negative result for the period 2016-2018. Buoyed by a favourable economic context and an encouraging legislative framework, business start-ups reached record levels in 2018 (691,300) and 2019 (815,300), while business failures fell sharply, reaching a low not seen since the 2008 financial crisis (51,700 in 2019).