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President Emmanuel Macron hosts the Choose France summit at Versailles Palace – a royal venue designed to encourage princely sums, and his office announced this morning that the nation has secured €15 billion euros of foreign investments in 56 different projects, including €4 billion from Microsoft, €1.2 billion from Amazon.
Added to this, big pharma players Pfizer said it would invest €500 million in France to build up its research and development presence in the country while AstraZeneca announced an investment of $388 million for its site at Dunkirk.
As the largest private contributor to the security and independence of France's health ecosystem, Sanofi announced an investment of more than €1 billion to create new bioproduction capacity at its sites in Vitry-sur-Seine (Val de Marne), Le Trait (Seine-Maritime) and Lyon Gerland (Rhône).
This new investment will create more than 500 jobs and significantly strengthen France's ability to control the production of essential medicines from start to finish, for the present day and into the future. This plan brings to more than €3.5 billion the amount committed by Sanofi since the Covid-19 pandemic in major projects to keep production of medicines and vaccines in France for patients around the world.
Paul Hudson, Chief Executive Officer, Sanofi, explained: "Thanks to the transformation undertaken since 2020, Sanofi has a record number of medicines and vaccines in development that could become best-in-class and help meet major public health challenges. With these unprecedented industrial investments, we remain true to our history by once again choosing France to produce these future medicines and make them available to patients around the world. France is, and always will be, at the heart of Sanofi's strategy."