By Sudip Kar-Gupta and Elizabeth Pineau
PARIS (Reuters) -France on Sunday secured new jobs and investments from internet giant Amazon (NASDAQ:) healthcare company Pfizer (NYSE:) and Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley, as the country prepared to host a major foreign investment summit.
President Emmanuel Macron will kick off the annual ‘Choose France’ event on Monday, aimed at attracting major companies from abroad. The 2023 edition attracted 13 billion euros in foreign investments.
The French presidency said on Sunday that Amazon would announce an additional investment of 1.2 billion euros in France, which could create 3,000 new jobs, while healthcare companies Pfizer and AstraZeneca (NASDAQ:) announced new investments worth a total of almost 1 billion dollars.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire added that Morgan Stanley, which plans to increase its total workforce in Paris to 500 by 2025, has added 100 staff in the French capital.
Macron wants to strengthen Paris’s role as Europe’s top business capital. The French economy, the second largest in the euro zone, is under pressure due to the budget deficit, while growth in the first quarter was only 0.2 percent.
COMPETITION FROM US, CHINA
Paris traditionally lags behind New York and London as a global financial center, with New York ranked as the world’s top financial center in the closely watched Z/Yen survey, published in March, with London in the second place.
Le Maire said France and the European Union as a whole still need to do more against competition from China and the US, with French oil giant TotalEnergies (EPA:) saying last month it was considering having its primary listing in New York. .
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At an EU meeting in Brussels this week, Le Maire said he would reaffirm the need for a capital markets union to facilitate investment in new sectors of the economy such as renewable energy and artificial intelligence.
“Europe needs money. If not, it will continue to lose in terms of productivity to the United States and China.”
Le Maire added that as part of the ‘Choose France’ event on Monday, he would organize meetings with the CEOs of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, among others.
“These roundtable discussions will give us the opportunity to reconnect with the major financial investors so that they can continue to set up branches in Paris and finance the major industrial and economic projects we are working on with the President,” Le Maire said.
($1 = 0.9286 euros)
