Good afternoon ! I am Anne Marion-Bouchacourt and I work for
Société Générale in China. I think it’s difficult to see Europe without talking about
China. China is nowadays a major economic player,
the 2nd most powerful economy and it wants to play a key role in multilateral relations
to the height of its size. If we look more precisely, it benefited from
WTO (World Trade Organization) and from its entry in the WTO. It allowed the growth of
these last 30 years. And China wents to keep benefit from it, in our environnment In the
speech made by Xi Jinping in Davos, we see that he is pro-liberal and advocates “Free
Trade”. Indeed, there is a second circumstance: the arrival of Trump with an important question
for China about the reliability of the American partner and then a most major role to occupy
for Europe.
But to pursue its development, China need to grow up the value Chain and this is the
objective of the 13th plan while focus on markets where there is growth, and where China
can have a competitive advantage. They want to create national champions who will become
eventually international champions. For that, they target to saturate their own market with
market shares between 70% and 80% for local companies on key industries. there is national
growth but also international acquisitions, especially in Europe. Europe is seen as a
place where, thanks to a weak euro, they could invest in strong companies with new technologies,
strong brands. Integrated circuit domain interests considerably China that has a slight delay.
- Aerospace industry and aircraft equipment is also an interesting sector. Before 2035,
China must buy between 5 and 6 000 aircrafts, so this is a huge market. The rail is also
an important market along side the silk road where they want to impose their own applicable
standards and already have important players.
- “Clean cars” is a growing market with the sale in 2016 of 517 000 clean cars and
a a target of 4.8 billion recharging stations by 2020.
- Another sector is biomedicine and medical devices. The demand for medical devices will
triple, to 300 billion $.
- And finally, new materials and all that is important for machine tool.
They are also this key initiative launched by the … silk route. This project is very
important for the President Shi on May 14th. It aims to integrate its turbulent neighbors,
building on each others strengths = natural resources vs large capacities in infrastructure
but also to allow the exploitation of the Chinese overcapacities. It deals with industrial
infrastructures. There are 4 main roads today: 3 overland roads and one sea road. With this
project, Europe will be integrated in the Chinese economic zone.
With appropriate railroad infrastructure, we will need 15 days to transport goods between
China and France instead of 50-60 days by boat.
There is need of 26th trillion US$ to build all the needed infrastructure and China is
trying to get every stakeholder around the table to participate.
China sees an important strategic interest and plans to invest between 800 and 1 000
billion $ in the creation of this infrastructures. Another key potential opportunity for Europe’s
agriculture. China is very late on this subject with huge quality problems. They want to modernize
their agriculture. It’s a potential for Europe but also a challenge because it could
create strong companies that could challenge us and our more scattered industries.
About the relations with China, I’d like to say to there is a first challenge at the
State level. In China, the State pilots the economic decisions. While, in Europe, numerous
states do not interfere in these decisions, there are at large companies level, regulators
but states are not active on economic decisions. I think we really have to try to understand
the Chinese way of working. If we want a win-win relationship between France and China, we
must find mechanisms of interaction between states and see who bring what in order to
enhance prosperity for both sides.